


Leave My Kitten Alone

by Xogoi_Momo



Series: Big Kitty Goth Boyfriend [1]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Kemonomimi, Alternate Universe - Laboratory, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Instincts, Animal Traits, Applied Comparative Religion, Author Distracted By the Boss Being Hot Again, Awkward Crush, Awkward First Times, Cameos, Canon Het Relationship, Cat/Human Hybrids, Comparative Religion, Courtship, Date Rape Drug/Roofies, Duty, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Faked Suicide, Family Feels, Fatherhood, Fish, Fishing, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Ghost Gossip, Ghosts, Haircuts, Hurt/Weird Comfort, Hybrids, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, It's Not Femdom if It's The Boss, Kemonomimi, Language Barrier, Lima Syndrome, Mad Science, Masturbation, Naked Male Clothed Female, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Ocelot Family Feels, POV Multiple, POV Original Character, Period-Typical Sexism, Pining, Poetry, Poncho Feels, Ponchos, Ponchos Were an Important Theme in MGS3, Possession, Power Imbalance, Reunions, Revolver Ocelot Doesn't Have Head Lice, Spirits, Syncretism, Unethical Experimentation, background bosselot, banality of evil, bildungsroman, glamping, lightly fried fish fillets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-06 01:45:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 42,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16379033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xogoi_Momo/pseuds/Xogoi_Momo
Summary: People call Subject 0051 lots of different names, partly because he can't speak to correct them.  He doesn't mind, does he?  Silly experimental cat-man, just staring off at the corner like he's seen a ghost.The big blonde lady is the one who gets it right, even more than he did himself.  She's right about a lot of things, and Sorrow doesn't think he'd argue with her even if she weren't.





	1. a name that's particular

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Precious Baby Kitten](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13510785) by [Not_You](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_You/pseuds/Not_You). 



Besides the ears and the tail and the big furry paw-hands, Sorrow understands that he's different right from the beginning, but it isn't anything he has to be a genius, or even particularly gifted in the powers of observation, to figure out.

Well, he is gifted in one power of observation. Really, it's a chicken-and-the-egg thing--he talks to the ghost people (and when it's them he can _really_ talk to them, just like regular-person talking) and the ghost people just come right out and tell him that yeah, he's the only one who does that, so it's not like he had to put two and two together when they were already being so helpful.

One of the ghost people here is 73's mom. 73 isn't not really her son, if you look at it like that--they made him out of lots of different parts, animals and people, in a dish and in some tubes, and then they put him inside of her to grow--but she felt him the whole time and it felt like he was hers, so Sorrow agrees; she should get to decide, after all of that.

She got to hold 73 and touch his soft little claws and feed him for a few days, but then there was something that went bad with how they cut him out of her and it made her sick and she died. Now she wants to tell 73 that she loves him, that _someone_ loves him, and also that his name isn't just 73 but she was going to tell him that also it's Oleg like her father, and that's the first time Sorrow really wishes he could talk, for more reasons than just not disappointing the scientists.

Sorrow tries hard not to disappoint the scientists; he would have known that's a good idea even without all the ghosts weighing in, and he does like it when they're happy. Sorrow already wishes he could write better, that he had clever just-like-a-real-human hands like 66 and 85 who get taken out of Class for special teaching and come back with treats. He doesn't think that he cares one way or another about shooting the guns, but 66 came back once with a big oily piece of salmon, _smoked,_ and it smelled wonderful.

Even if Sorrow could use his paws to write neat and quick and small, in perfect little lines marching across the paper, it would take him too many of those lines to explain to 73 about his mother and being Oleg. He'd have to start out with explaining that he sees the ghost people in the first place, and by the time he got through all of that, one of the scientists would surely have noticed that the two of them were off in the corner, Sorrow's tail twitching and 73-Oleg's tongue curling out of his snout and both of them obviously up to No Good.

Sorrow doesn't think that he wants the scientists to know the ghosts are talking to him, and so far, all of the ghosts agree. They almost never agree, so that must mean it's important. Sorrow also knows he doesn't want the scientists to call him Bad, or tell each other he has Behavioral Issues, but he figured that one out all by himself. They only call him 51, and that's fine, but it's not like there are even fifty other kids here. _Subjects._ Sometimes things happen, but later, after they already got a number, so that's why Sorrow isn't 49 but nobody else is, either. Not any more, anyway.

Nobody actually calls 51 "Sorrow" except some of the ghost people. (Some of them think it's silly, and some of them are too busy with their own problems to listen to him, once they find out he's listening to _them._ ) "Sorrow" is a word from one of the stories they read in Class, him and the other subjects; it isn't a human name like Oleg's mother wants Oleg to know he has, but that's part of why Sorrow likes it. It's only his, and nobody alive calls him or calls anybody else that. In his experience, alive people saying your name, or your number, or what they decided is your name, has never been the beginning of a good thing.

~(=^‥^)

62 was made out of human and animal parts in a dish, just like everybody else, but her spotted cat ears and rosetted tail are from a jaguar, where Sorrow's are more stripey, because they're from an ocelot. Sorrow knows this because 62 was very upset when two of the other girls said that she was the same as him, and they should get _married._ A jaguar is much bigger and stronger than an ocelot, which might as well just be a big spotted house cat that _hides_ like Sorrow tried to hide, tried to settle the sudden disagreement by averting his eyes and showing her his big dumb paws, nothing like her nimble fingers. Nothing to worry about. He chirped in a friendly way but that made her more upset, except she was upset with him, this time.

Ocelots are not endangered. In the wild, they live as far north as Texas, which Sorrow knows is where cowboys come from, too. Jaguars are big and strong, one of the largest land carnivores, and they can roar just like lions and tigers. Jaguars never purr. Ocelots purr, and meow and yowl, at best. In South America, people made their gods look like jaguars. In South America, _ocelot_ was the word for jaguar, but the ocelots kept it because people got confused, and nobody cares too much about an ocelot to give them their own name.

Sorrow messed himself a little when she bit him (and kept biting him) but he didn't mean it in the Behavioral Issues way, like he already knows for sure he's not supposed to. Some of the ghosts wanted him to fight back, but the ones who give good advice, and some of the ones who used to be animal people like him, reminded him that he should make it very easy for the scientists to see who is Being Good. By then 71 was fighting with 66, like they always did if there weren't Activities, 73 was rolled into his own scaly ball and 48 was hanging from the light fixture, using her own perfect human voice to tell them to _stop it, stop it._

Sorrow just held onto himself and was Good, so Good, and when they came in soon after with the rope-sticks, they could tell it wasn't his fault, not the pee or the blood. 62's perfect human hands have claws, too, which is the kind of thing they call the Best of Both Worlds, while Sorrow is a mute, clumsy boy-and-cat, but he didn't hurt anyone, or fight, or pee in the corners of the little room with the _smell_ that they put him in after. He paced and stalked and left little bloody smears on the wall, not that he wanted to, but he couldn't help leaning on the wall if he didn't want to fall over. Sorrow knew the ocelot parts of him would feel better, feel safer if he could mark the little room as his territory, but he also knew that he Knows Better; they told him and they showed him that a long time ago, and he knew he didn't want them to have to remind him.

When they came for him, they didn't smell afraid, which was good because that meant _they_ knew he was going to Be Good. Sorrow was a little afraid, but the ghost who used to be 33, a sad-eyed boy made out of parts of a sea lion, walked with him, and told him that they were all walking away from the room with the grate in the floor, so that at least was good. 33 had told Sorrow about that room before, and he was the one to know.

The scientist who shaved little patches of Sorrow's hair and fur and sewed him up was as gentle as Sorrow could expect. Sorrow can't speak, can barely write, doesn't have the clever fingers to fire a gun or pick apart wiring, and he doesn't have the Killer Instinct, he's heard them talking and planning about him and he knows all of this. 

That's a tough one to understand, even with all the ghost people helping him: he needs to Be Good, definitely, but somehow just how good Sorrow is at Being Good is disappointing to the scientists too. The next time he sees 62 walk past the classroom she sticks her little pink tongue out at him. She's got the _big_ collar on and all of the subjects know what that means, that you're almost Wild enough not to be brought to Class and taught human things, but at the same time, she's walking with 66 and 85, and 33 drifts in and tells him that he knows they're heading to the firing range.

Nobody gives Sorrow a chance to earn any smoked salmon, but he never has to wear the collar either. _All you can do in this life is to try to keep on living,_ Oleg's mother tells him, and Sorrow can feel her ghost-hand gentle behind his ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a retroactively authorized prequel (thanks, Not_You) to the excellent _Metal Gear_ kemonomimi AU [_Precious Baby Kitten_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13510785/chapters/30987597) and unavoidably contains one (1) spoiler for that work, as the middle of this story meets up with the middle of that one. 
> 
> It should stand alone, but _Precious Baby Kitten_ really helps explain why _"hey, everybody, do you ever wonder what would it be like if the Sorrow were even more literally part ocelot, like the actual wildcat, with ears and a tail and stuff"_ needed to be its own story, so you may still want to read that first.
> 
> [TL; DR: Adam Ocelot is a One, with claws, on the old [Furry Scale;](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/furry-scale) his lab-grown father is a Two (and we won't mention the ghosts), but if the Boss were bothered by people's personal style, she wouldn't be sharing a tent with a coworker who gestates bees in his flesh.]
> 
> This was also initially plotted out to be three (3) chapters long. ( _Thanks,_ Not_You.) It's complete, but I'm rereading and delousing chapters before I post them. I appreciate comments, including the ones that help me catch the typos that made it through one of the holes in the screens.


	2. głaszcz ty kotowi skórę, a on ogon wzgórę

This part of the installation is quiet in the mornings, just rhythmic metal sounds from fans and carts and the irregular human noises of Day shift coming in for handoff. The occupants of this wing tend to sleep in, if you let them. The unofficial designation of the unit where Sergei works is the cat house, and it makes sense that you'd keep all the subjects whose wild instincts are telling them to be nocturnal sort of in the same place, so you don't have, say, an elephant girl pounding her huge fist through the wall at 2200, yelling at the bobcat twins to _stop yowling._

Even in the unit, the subjects have enough doors and walls between them that none of them are exactly roommates, and thank God for that. The ventilation system is supposed to keep them from smelling each other, too, but that's a tall order for even the strongest super secret science-grade HVAC to accomplish. The subjects might be less on edge if they didn't have those floating reminders of each other; to Sergei, shrugging on his facility-washed lab coat, it smells like cats here, but a lot more like a vet's than an auntie's house, so that could be worse. 

What else could be worse is his personal assignment: there are the cat-people in training, the ones attached to Combat, and those guys are off in the secured barracks. They're close enough to human assets for government work, even with their specialized behavioral accommodations, such as dim lighting and doors that lock from the outside. Then there are the cats who washed out due to being a little too excited about ripping out throats to accept direction; they're out here in the cat house, but so are the ones who never got that far. Too catlike to ever share their goals with humans, some that are maybe not too catlike but definitely too angry, and always a mixed bag of sad renal failure cases, purring as they circle the drain.

Rank, or at least longevity, hath its privileges. Sergei hasn't taken any photostats of the _secret_ stuff, jimmied a lock or shown up drunk in the years he's worked here, which for a tech is about all you can do to get yourself fired, since "fired," once you've seen the subjects, is a long walk out a short hallway into the woods, barefoot, and that's only plausible every so often. (Mistreating the subjects is frowned upon, but not very well defined; in the cat house, there's a degree of common sense about claws that you need above anything else.) 

Halfway down the end of the hallway is the door for Sergei's usual charge, 0051, who is an average-sized man a little bit younger than him, with the dubious luck to have a genome that's part medium-sized wildcat. They even both work for the government, although most of the government doesn't know it, and Sergei is the only one who draws what could even pretend to be a paycheck.

Mainly the guy reminds Sergei of two things: one is the ragged tom back on the farm who remained innately skeptical of humans but would cautiously allow a scratch to his increasingly-bony back, spry and the terror of mice until he vanished in the honorable death of an old cat. 

The other thing 0051 reminds Sergei of is a person, the caretaker at his secondary school who used to be and maybe was still, quietly, the sexton, humble and efficient with the mop, eyes to something greater that he loved no less for being unable to share it. 0051 doesn't have those same organist's fingers, but he gets the same little smile when he's staring more-than-catlike into the wall or through and beyond the greasy window. 0051 has more to fear than a visit from the commissar, too, but there's a species of that smile that he makes when he sees Sergei, too, and something in Sergei hopes it's not just because he usually shares his lunch. 

"Hey there, Fraidy Cat," he says to the empty-looking cage that takes up most of the room. Floor to ceiling, enough room to get around it on every side. The cat- or dog- or God forbid bear-man you're helping wrangle might need that, especially if you're a probationary tech who _doesn't_ get his pick of the subjects.

Some of the other cages are bare, except for what goes into and comes out of the subject. Some of them have cardboard boxes, or other things that don't hurt if they get flung through the bars. This cage has an institutional-issue single bed, sheets and all, because its occupant has earned it with good behavior. It also has a ceiling-tall structure of bolted-together logs and heavy branches, because that's where the occupant prefers to sleep.

The bed has been made every day, though. Neat and tight, even if there are little claw-holes peppering the hospital corners.

"Wake up, big guy." Sergei taps on the bars with his hotshot, more because it makes a nice ringing noise than as any kind of threat. Not in this room; it goes right back in the holster as soon as he hears a rustling up above. "They want a specimen today. How's that for good morning, huh?"

Fraidy Cat--Subject 0051 by the label on the collection slip, and if you go by the "nicknaming the subjects can lead to a written Warning" memo that gets tacked up in the break room every few months--appears silently, dropping down from one of the branches with that feline grace that's such a strange fit with how mousy and unassuming everything else is about him. 

He sees Sergei and gives a half-smile that's nothing but sincere, and snakes his arm out between the bars, claws sheathed, big fuzzy hand relaxed. There's striped and spotted golden fur on his arm, from his paw-hand almost up to his elbow, but there are minuscule white crescent-moon scars in his antecubital, if you know to look, and Fraidy Cat is as calm as any repeat blood donor to offer it up. Honestly, whoever 86'd this guy from field training was an idiot; _there's_ your team spirit for you.

"Not that; sorry buddy. Too easy, yeah?" You're also not supposed to engage in casual contact with the subjects, per one of the other memos they're always posting, but Sergei can't help but pat his big paw-hand. This one's going to be tough. 

There's a tape recorder in the room, the usual bulky thing that looks like a film projector with no light. The ones who talk get a lot more use out of them, so under the zip cover there's just one reel of tape they dug up for 0051. Sergei sighs and starts it running, the hiss of the dead air marking it as a copy of some LP copied from some wire recording, maybe out in the jungle or in a zoo somewhere.

0051 seems to catch on early, his posture minutely braced and his big spotted ears twitching as Sergei comes back to get the specimen cup out of the cooler. "Here. Dr. E said you know how to do this one on your own. Not pee, OK? The other thing. You know." Sergei throws in a bit of the usual explanatory gesture, the one recognized on every playground, just as throaty growls start to fade in on the tape; some researcher years ago crawling closer to a lady ocelot, or Herself walking out to investigate. Fraidy Cat turns his face away, breathing heavily and hunching up his bony shoulders in the thin patient pajamas that swim on him otherwise.

It's weird to think of a _subject_ having cause to blush, but again, if it weren't for those halfway green-shining eyes--and the tail, and the ears, and the little patches of fur behind them where his hair ends, and the fangs peeking from his open mouth, and OK, there's actually a lot of stuff that makes 0051 obviously a cat-man, but at the same time Sergei thinks it's completely reasonable that a guy's going to be embarrassed. He just woke up and here's Sergei playing him the wildcat version of a blue movie and hoping he doesn't have to come right out and _say_ "the guys in the lab want you to jerk off now."

Which they do, and their mutual bosses are the ones signing the checks. Sergei has time to speculate, for as much as speculation ever gets him, while he disregards yet another tacked-up reminder: he pointedly turns his back on Subject 0051, who grabs the cup and darts up into the mess of branches, the rosettes on his twitching tail a blur in Sergei's peripheral vision. With the strangled lawnmower purr-growls 0051's trying to swallow starting to harmonize with the canned ones on the tape, it's not like Fraidy Cat is sneaking up on anyone, and human or not, a man deserves some privacy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _głaszcz ty kotowi skórę, a on ogon wzgórę:_ Polish, the more you stroke the cat, the more he raises his tail.


	3. gdy kota nie ma, myszy harcują

What the bigwigs are working on now is obviously some kind of breeding program, or gearing up for one. It has to be more economical than muddling around with proteins and enzymes to make these one-off animal-people who come out stillborn, who could turn out to have crap kidneys, who could be a little bit too homicidal to be useful, or who might just grow up into _Ferdinand the Bull_ like Fraidy Cat here.

As awkward as the collection procedure is, Sergei is glad for his personal assignment with Fraidy Cat once again when he's in the canteen and sees what happened to Karol's jaw, and then the empty seats where the bear crew like to gather. When Dr. E gave Sergei his first rundown on the various procedures 0051 was known to cooperate with, Sergei had kept his opinions to himself about what kind of scientist was proud of teaching a half-cat research subject about masturbation, but now he's thinking he needs to write the deputy director a thank you card that he's not going to have "tried to cram an electric probe up a sloth bear" on his tombstone.

Even with these setbacks to the rank and file, the eggheads are making their plans. The cat house subjects are nearly all boys, either a demographic quirk or something about the female of the species being more deadly than the male. More reliably so, anyway; there's no percentage in having a murder-machine you can't point at the enemy. Whatever egghead with a green eyeshade on his brow is running the numbers, Sergei figures he has to be pleased about that wrinkle. General-issue human women, even the paid volunteers, are much cheaper incubators, up to and including the replacement costs if things go south, like they can even in a garden variety pregnancy.

Incubators and full-on mothers, this go-around, other than the volunteers who are using eggs that were borrowed from some bloodied tigress or she-wolf in between her combat missions. The company line is something about hybrid vigor, but they're probably also hoping for fewer mutes, ferals and slow failures to thrive. Sergei's noticed they don't even have a standard checkbox for pacifism, which is probably part of why Fraidy Cat seems to be getting more attention than ever, these days. The guy can't say anything but "meow," but 0051 is a sharp one, and _cooperative_ to a fault, literally. All Fraidy Cat's kids would need to inherit from a prospective mother would be hands, a voice and a bloodlust that isn't tied to survival; two of those qualities are what separate Man from the animals anyway, since there are already monkeys out there with fingers.

This bureaucratically mandated mating season has everyone on edge; even a plain old punch-clock human like Sergei can feel the tension. There are scattered yowls, both recorded and live, in the evening hours, and the air feels thick with sweat and pheromones. 0051's cooperation is an exception in the cat house, and some of the more serious metal racks and chutes get dollied through the unit. The first time they hear the rattle the poor guy just freezes, ears flattening to his head. Sergei automatically reaches out and pats Fraidy Cat's shoulder across the counter that's built half-into the cage wall, for testing and passing things back and forth.

"Hey, hey, that's not coming for you, big guy. They're taking specimens--you know, like you've been giving in the cups. It's just, not everyone's as helpful as you are. Remember that time they put you in with 0084?"

Fraidy Cat nods hesitantly and fumbles up his sleeve to point at a cat-person-sized bite scar, his ears slowly dialing back up to full staff. Yeah, Sergei doesn't have to check the files to tell you that 0051 is not even one of the Moderate Risk subjects. "No, don't worry; I didn't mean you were going in with her again. As far as I know, they just want those samples, and you don't need anyone's help for that, yeah? Not like some of them out there, buddy."

Sergei sucks his teeth and gestures vaguely out to the hallway where the metal noises even now are fading, and Fraidy Cat vigorously signs his paw-hand version of "yes," which doesn't need any more dexterity than a fist that can nod in time with his head.

Poor guy. Sergei had been one of the rookies shoved in to pull 0084 off of 0051, back in the day, and not for the first time he questions if Fraidy Cat understands why they're asking for these particular specimens, what happens with the little vials when they go to the lab and what might already be growing somewhere. It's not like anyone goes out of their way to tell Sergei either, but he wonders if Fraidy Cat has any idea at _all_ what women are like, cat or human or a mix of both like he is. 

The occasional matron on the unit is nothing but a buttoned-up form in a white coat, same as Sergei is; 0084 was a whirl of claws and, yeah, teeth, and all that led to was a new directive from upstairs to sidebar attempts at captive breeding and get back to work on fine-tuning tranquilizer formulations. The hand signs Sergei's got with him are a lot more useful for poker, nothing to let Fraidy Cat share his feelings about fatherhood, or rhapsodize on what kind of a girl might get him going.

~(=^‥^)

The fever pitch breaks into a mundane crisis that everyone at the installation has dealt with before: an official inspection. Time for the techs to use some elbow grease, and time for the scientists to cross their fingers that the techs don't foul up, that the subjects don't bite anyone or crap on the floor, and that whatever they're calling _breakthroughs_ these days sound just as promising to the guys writing the checks. Allocating funds, more like, when they're dressing it up like the military guys and the government representatives always do. 

The big-deal tours start out in the labs, with some lectures in front of test tubes until the scientists finally realize their audience is getting bored. After that, the cat house tends to be their next stop on-site, unless it's lunch first. There's something majestic about even a sick or a substandard cat-person, and all of the cats, even the feral abominations, are prone to siesta in the early afternoons. Sleepy time for monsters reduces the chances of one of those Adverse Events that's so bad for funding, and after that the friendly canids should be out for a run and ready to catch a stick in their teeth.

It's all clockwork, usually, which is why Sergei is attending to 0051's toilette around 1900. Some of the other cat-people are still growling over their dinners, but Fraidy Cat is pretty reliable; Sergei can just slide him the tray and he'll sit at the testing counter and carefully eat with his paws, washing them first and everything. (Even if there weren't very specific guidelines about giving implements to the subjects, it's not like a fork would make it more humane. Probably worse, if he tried to hold one with those fuzzy meathooks.)

He pushes the tray back when he's done, too, neat as you like. Fraidy Cat's not always in the Clean Plate Club, but they don't have to send a puree of vegetable-meat-whatever to make sure he gets the vitamins a half-human needs. When the kitchen boils the carrots in little chunks, it's even more catlike how he daintily spears them one-at-a-time with his claws.

So the threat of a visit from the brass has been moved to tomorrow and the dinner dishes have been sent away in a timely fashion. Sergei ate his bag lunch, too, not that anyone keeps track other than Fraidy Cat, who enjoys company at the table. That leaves plenty of time for a good little subject to get his hair trimmed by his good little tech, all to reflect better on the Project, of course.

Fraidy Cat seems to prefer doing these things in the evenings, anyway--he's definitely not a morning semi-person--and nobody else in the cat house is already using the clippers when Sergei goes to get them. _Timing._ The one concession to it being an official visit day is that Sergei puts the cuffs on Fraidy Cat as he lets him out of the cage. Not before, like you're supposed to, and they're not the heavy ones that tie his paw-hands to his waist to his paw-feet that are indicated by the presence of bladed tools, but if someone peeks in, they'll be fine for at least as long as spectating a barber visit is interesting.

"You know how it is," Sergei apologizes, and Fraidy Cat shrugs amiably; of course he does. Sergei was here when Dr. M from one of the Asian sister sites came and snaked those tubes down the guy's throat without so much as a "please," watched tears run quietly from his big grey eyes as the doctor just kept managing to fit more things in there until he finally said no, this one's never going to talk. 

_That_ just got Sergei a couple of couldn't-help-it claw pricks from where he was holding Fraidy Cat's paw-hand, even though the rack was doing a fine job of restraining him on its own. In comparison, a haircut and the barest concession to security is peanuts. They set Fraidy Cat up on a chair with his shirt off and a towel around his neck. Cat fur is one thing, but the mostly-human hair on his head is a known bitch to clean up. 

If 0051 were one of the Extreme Risk subjects, he'd be getting a buzz cut once or twice a year, the same time they knocked him out for dentistry and general maintenance. Sergei has no delusions of going to beauty school, but the cat house's electric clippers came with some reasonably straightforward diagrams, and Fraidy Cat is patient enough to deserve a fancy haircut, the kind that uses an entire two different clipper guides. It might be a brush cut; the booklet has suffered some water damage, and the concept of "short on the sides, not as short on the top" is a common one. Although it isn't specifically recommended for people with giant ocelot ears, it works all right with that and with the receding hairline they probably didn't design into 0051 on purpose. 

Sergei is trimming up Fraidy Cat's sides, his head tipped forward, when the outer metal door slams open. That's how it always sounds, but it's a surprise for both of them, with concentration and the noise of the clippers. Sergei and Fraidy Cat both look up at the same time to see a small committee of official-looking military, their guards, their scientist liaison and a sturdy-looking woman in unmarked fatigues stranding next to the brass.

Looking up during a haircut, however, is a bad move, especially when your deputized barber is equally distracted. In one instant, Sergei runs the clippers into the base of Fraidy Cat's ear and Fraidy Cat meows and flinches, his loosely-shackled paws raising up past his chest before he catches himself. Well, so would anyone; Sergei would've cursed in the same situation, and he sure as hell isn't expecting a tip now. 

The guys with rifles--wow, real ones--raise them. So does the scientist with his tranq pistol, but the grunts look like they were already rattled by the subjects existing in the first place, let alone meowing their valid complaints about lousy service. Time's slowing down like a traffic accident, and it's shaping up to be a really bad day when Sergei surprises himself by throwing an arm in front of Fraidy Cat.

"Hey guys, wait," he says, heroically, but that's not the only surprise: across the room, the blonde lady is doing the same thing, albeit silently, with the official flat-palm gesture Sergei vaguely recalls from his national service days. The guards comply, she fixes Sergei with an even gaze and nods, and Fraidy Cat slowly finishes putting his paw-hands up to his head to hold his ears forward and out of the way.

"Go ahead," she commands him. Or possibly commands them; Sergei doesn't ask twice as he gets back to blending Fraidy Cat's sides, but the next time he looks up the rest of the group is gone, leaving just the big lady standing next to them, arms crossed. 

The big lady--granted, towering over Sergei isn't hard, but even if she'd been a full head shorter there's an authority around her that makes her seem eight feet high. This isn't just the kind of official matron who can get him disciplined or terminated; Sergei is immediately aware that this lady is the kind who could feed someone their own teeth, and make them thank her, after. A quick glance torn away from her piercing gaze lets him see that Fraidy Cat is in agreement, big grey eyes darting around her like he's maybe wishing he were back in with 0084.

"...Did you have questions, ma'am?" Sergei finally asks, as he rationalizes that paying careful attention to stowing away the clippers is _good dedication to duty_ and also a valid reason to stop looking directly at her.

"This is number fifty-one," she says, and that's not a question but he's not going to argue with her, either. "He's been recommended strongly for the hybrid program. What are your thoughts on that?"

So that's what enough rope to hang himself looks like; Sergei has a hard time grabbing hold of it. 

"He's a good guy, ma'am. Subject. He's really cooperative. Uh, and he's pretty healthy, too. But he's not a fighter, ma'am, and you'd probably want to pick a good fighter." Sergei isn't sure how many volunteers the big blonde matron is commanding, but as much as he believes in his own charge, he doesn't want either of them getting held responsible for a nursery full of cat-eared pacifists. Fraidy Cat nods agreement, still looking a little bit to the side of her head.

"That's fine," she says, with the first hint of a smile as she reaches out and tousles Fraidy Cat's hair, spending just a little bit more time rubbing around the ears. It's good that 0051 has all that practice holding still, but Sergei thinks he probably should breathe a little. "Only one of us needs to have the spirit of the warrior."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _gdy kota nie ma, myszy harcują:_ Polish, when the cat's away, the mice will play.


	4. koketsu ni irazunba koji-o ezu

One completely predictable aspect of being hailed as a legendary soldier is how often you're invited to read in on attempts to create The Ultimate Soldier. In this instance the scheme is moderately less harebrained than usual. Nobody is being brainwashed or injected or implanted, no robots thus far; as crackpot an idea as "animal-people" sounds like, the Boss has to admit that they've been getting the job done.

Of course, there's a "but," and in this case, it's the most common Ultimate Soldier bugaboo: there's a breeding program. Predictable. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; when you bring a uterus to the fight, no matter how often that's literally, and _well,_ people assume you're advertising it for a tenant.

There's another adage, though, about how often a stopped clock is right. Although she'd never describe herself as maternal, the Boss has also never shied away from a challenge. She's been thinking about taking on a similar project for a while, on a more individual level, reviewing the records available to her and making an offer without obligations to the appropriate male candidate in interests of a personal legacy to abut her public one. This second-generation animal/human hybrid project, the unlisted, need-to-know scientific black site she's touring _this_ week, is lucky enough to come at the right time.

If the end result lets her raise a son or daughter with a preternatural strength-to-weight ratio and irremovable holdout weapons, well, a date with a savage cat-man shouldn't be worse than cozying up to a human chosen solely for his fitness scores and service records. The cat is least a change from an evening at the officers' club.

Thus, in the prime of her career, the Boss finds herself in another tour group of career military men, taking mental notes that could do for a chapter in an eyes-only Fodor's Guide to top secret scientific installations. This section has windows, and is making an effort to ventilate away the telltale odors of biology; it smells like a zoo, but a well-kept one. Better that than the stale urine of a cheap circus, or the acid tang of fear in an animal laboratory that's been under pressure for results.

They're making their rounds late; there had been grumbling as the Boss lobbied to continue, rather than break early for hotel rooms and comped dinners, but a doughy lieutenant colonel became her ally with an argument for a late start the next morning via a nearby golf course. _Predicable,_ but appreciated. What idiot would want to visit the big cat exhibit in the heat of day, anyway, when they could watch them stretch and come to life at dusk, perfect killing machines readying themselves for the hunt?

And the half-human cats are, for once, as promised: sleek and strong and full of feral dignity, even caged. Without the bars, those techs in the ill-fitting lab coats would be meat, and the Boss enjoys catching that realization in the cats' and the floor staff's eyes. That the techs might be terrified of her is another possibility, one she's used to and doesn't mind. At a black site laboratory, her threat is more of reporting misconduct to a supervisor who's concerned about making good impressions on visiting dignitaries, but it still carries a shadow of her ability to exact discipline on the battlefield. As it should be; there's no room for slackers anywhere.

Their guide, a standard-issue bespectacled toady, takes them through the building from common-use (under guard) areas to single-specimen barracks. He's already slipped once and called it "the cat house," which the Boss finds ironically appropriate for her intention. She doesn't feel sordid, though; this is the straightforward requisition of a service. She's already done her homework with the specimen directory, and is discreetly on alert for seeing the bearers of certain serial numbers in the flesh.

With that research under her belt, Number 63 was on the Boss' shortlist before she even saw him, but in the flesh he does not disappoint. Tiger-striped across his broad shoulders, muscle rippling as he swims laps in the institution's pool, his tail straight behind him in the water. When he sees the tour group, he slows his strokes to show off the water displacement with those big, strong arms, the hands almost paws in their size, with just a sprinkling of fur on the backs. The tiger rotates in the water, using his flexible spine to best advantage, and the Boss would bet that those khaki trunks aren't Number 63's usual swimwear, and that they've been placed for her hypothetical modesty more than his.

The Boss walks closer to the pool while the military liaisons are occupied with an rundown of different cat breeds' natural aptitudes. All of that was in the provided documentation, but she's never surprised that a carefully-prepared briefing went unread by the upper echelons. More time for her personal investigation, then. 

She crouches at the edge of the pool and the tiger, with easy grace, drifts up next to her to rest one big arm on the concrete lip. His expression is as smug as any cat; he knows the impression he makes. Up close, his face is even more tiger-like; he has sideburns with the suggestion of stripes, a broad nose and a partially-divided phitrum that would mean a harelip on a pure human. 

"Hey," he starts, in a lazy rumble. His eyes are the most striking, and not for the first time the Boss thinks of how jealous one particular member of her special ops unit would be of these deep amber-to-green irises, reflecting the jungle from the industrial lighting of the natatorium. 

It's at that point that the tiger's handlers finally realize she's crossed their safe distance for VIPs, and start walking over at a quiet hustle. The Boss can see it in their faces: as much as they don't want her to be mauled by their beautiful specimen, they also don't want their supervisor to notice that they let her get that close in the first place. That's all right; this investigation has already made her decision easier. She looks one more time into the tiger's gleaming eyes and stands to her full height over him again, and he shrugs and smiles before turning lazily back into the water.

~(=^‥^)

As far as subordinates and their attention to duty when not directly supervised, the scene in Number 51's enclosure is nothing. 

Compared to the gatehouse guard who was scrambling to hide a crossword as he checked their papers, or the rifleman on her left whose scuffed boots the Boss has been aching to correct all day, this tech's effort to get his cat's dishwater blond crew-cut to spec is admirable, even if his situational awareness isn't. She's used to making men jumpy, enlisted men especially, so when the cat yowls it's an instinctual movement to signal a halt, cooling the soldiers' buck fever before they can shoot anything expensive.

Across the room, at a distance that would be easy to clear with a feline jump, this cat doesn't look like he's thinking about shredding anyone else's flesh. His huge paws are raised, but in surprise, claws sheathed; she can see he's gotten a graze at the base of one of those big, spotted ears. The tech, in a touching display of loyalty or guilt, has his own arm up in front of the cat like _he's_ the one in danger, and maybe that's true, although the Boss notes that the cuffs holding the cat's paws together are adjusted to a length that's purely decorative.

It's not the usual picture of Man's Second Best Friend. Plenty of the other cats have been shirtless and more, but perched on a chair in pajama pants, threadbare towel around his shoulders, Number 51 is just a cheap cigarette away from being an infantryman getting a haircut from a buddy. He has the black-and-gold ears he's babying now, the obvious tail, and small supernumerary nipples down his milk lines on both sides, which could be the breed standard or just a common quirk. There's more body hair hinted at under the towel than you'd see on the average private, but his eyes are what really spoil the comparison.

He's watching her carefully, the slit pupils in his grey-blue eyes darting back and forth, gleaming as they catch the light but always landing back on her. This is probably more unfamiliar humans than Number 51 sees in a year, but he's keeping his main focus on the Boss, hardly blinking, minutely tense and ready to evade from his perch on the straight-backed chair.

She has no trouble dismissing the rest of the tour group, who are bored already with this specimen, especially now that nobody's being eaten by a wildcat turned loose. From the looks on the soldiers' faces, they think she's going to give the tech a piece of her mind about safety and animal handling, and they're grateful for the bullet they've dodged.

As the tech nervously finishes grooming his cat (and stowing his gear, which is admirable), the Boss figures out what's niggling at her: Number 51 isn't like the cats she's been shown so far. He looks less like the beast she'd expected, a little like the recruits she's trained, but most of all, he's working hard to fight instinct, at keeping a studied calm to his outward bearing, like a POW who knows he has to bide his time. Observation first; cooperation, but not capitulation, and careful notes on when the guards make rounds.

There's a person in there, a strategist behind the claws and fur, and the Boss is certain of two things: that Number 51 is the candidate she wants to accompany her on her motherhood project, and that getting a thinking being's cooperation isn't going to be as simple as her tentative plan to grapple with the tiger specimen as long as she had to before instincts kicked in and he realized exactly what her goal was.

This tech is just as nervous as his ward, but it's touching how he's coming to the cat's defense, in the most cowardly and ineffectual way. Yes, even without the medical files to hand, the Boss is fully aware that Number 51 isn't a bruiser, and that the cat himself knows it. He's lean and wiry, assembled from one of the smaller wildcats. An ocelot, she's almost certain; she saw jaguars in the last hallway and their difference in bulk seals the comparison.

She moves closer and rubs Number 51's head, appreciating how hard he's working to stay still. His hair is softer than a human's, especially down toward his nape where it's almost fur, and his ears are warm and delicate. That isn't an animal panic in this cat-man's eyes. She can tell she's the focus of his attention, too. There's fear, a reasonable fear there, but he's holding steady, at least until he inclines his head the slightest bit toward her, and lets his wide eyes start to close. There's a movement that the Boss thinks is trembling, at first, until the volume rises and it's identifiable: a quiet, tentative purr.

She can work with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _koketsu ni irazunba koji-o ezu_ Japanese, if you do not enter the tiger's cave, you will not catch its cub. 
> 
> Discussing a draft of this chapter led to the summary "HELLO SOVIET SEX ZOO! I'M GONNA FUCK A TIGER" which is not really the mood I was going for, but if the Boss had to fill out paperwork, she was probably tempted to start condensing her Purpose of Visit after about the third or fifth one.


	5. if they would only purr for "yes" and mew for "no," so that one could keep up a conversation!

Now that she's made her decision, the Boss re-reads her files, just as anyone would. Despite his wildcat pedigree, Number 51 looks more like the cat who keeps mice out of the town library than a captive Lord of the Jungle. Still, he isn't a weakling, even when you compare him to the average cat coming out of this project, and next to the average human he'd make the Olympic committee scramble to write some new bylaws. If the ocelot-man had been a natural, free-range freak of nature, the Boss would have jumped to include him in her special ops unit. After all, most people aren't born with the joy of battle, but competency is something she's proven she can teach, and most people aren't born with claws and that kind of vertical leap, either. 

Not only sound in body, Number 51 also participated in the project's early education program, before a pencil-pusher in Risk Management or an upper-division geneticist with bite wounds determined that putting all of their half-human predators in a one-room schoolhouse was a botch. Excellent marks for participation and sharing, photostats of almost illegible worksheets with claw holes and tears around the edges, but all the pictures of things that start with the letter G are circled, even the tricky ones like "giraffe."

The Boss doesn't try to piece out how much the other "volunteers" here are that in name only; there are things you must do to survive in life just as in war, and it isn't her place to pass judgment on someone else's struggle. Still, some of their experience will be hers. Continuing her investigation, she learns that _in vitro_ efforts have so far been unsuccessful, and attempts at creating a hybrid _in vivo_ have been stalled by either common sense or common decency. Either one is surprising in a place like this, although the Boss doesn't presume any of the other volunteers have been matched by the interested third parties with a specimen as manageable as the one she's personally picked out. 

They also don't have her background in CQC, although she's always been drawn to teaching, and dreads the expanses of empty time coming up in her current plans. The volunteers' barracks aren't far from her personal quarters on-base; in the Boss' experience, Powers That Be are unconcerned about women's pastimes, as long as they're kept quiet and unobtrusive.

For her own personal project, she isn't intending to consummate anything at all during her first one-on-one meeting with Number 51. While the Boss is indifferent on the subject of physical virtue, she has theories about how far the cat's learned suspicion and natural dignity will let her get on the first date. Her request for privacy with the ocelot-man is more to facilitate a discussion, whatever form their discussion will have to take with his physical limitations. The intent of said discussion is to facilitate a working relationship, and from there on in she has the rest of the plan sketched out.

Yes, the cat's main _trainer_ does seem to have a good rapport with him, but in the Boss' opinion, the tech would blush long before she would. Number 51 has nothing to fear from her, but if the cat-man feels more comfortable with a chaperon, she'll grant his request... ah. She thanks the deputy director for his concern about her safety. No, she doesn't need a matron watching either, ready to tell guards outside the door when they need to storm in with their tranquilizer rifles.

That evening, as she enters the cat's enclosure with a duly-issued key and without any kind of escort, she realizes she should have been even more specific. There are no signs of quickly-added peepholes or microphones, the lights are at a comfortable setting... and Number 51 is naked and harnessed, on a slack chain that's fixed to an old bracket set in the floor. There's nobody around to ask about this but the cat. He's slumped over from a cross-legged sitting position, but turns his head up to look when the door of the cage rattles, and she sees he's wearing a muzzle, flattened just right to block a human-shaped jaw.

The Boss locks the heavy door after herself, with the intent of keeping things _out._ Her bearing is rigidly calm, the default she's trained into herself for when emotions threaten, and she crouches next to the cat-man to assess the situation. His spotted ears don't flatten and he doesn't flinch or cringe, just sways as he looks up at her with a small, sweet smile that really lets the tips of his fangs show. 

The Boss' guts feel tight; naked and hunched, Number 51 looks even more like a POW than before. The way his head slowly weaves and his slit grey-blue eyes jitter as he follows her movement makes something else clearer, too.

"They sedated you, so you wouldn't hurt me." He perks up, chirps and nods, rocking a furry fist up and down, then pokes one claw into the meat of his arm, like he's hitting a vein with a needle. Like a rookie, she follows the movement to his unblemished antecubital and immediately understands that of course he meant that metaphorically. Not metaphorically; like human goddamn language. He can't speak, so of course it's useless from a practical standpoint that she reaches over and unbuckles his muzzle, rubbing away the lines the straps have made in his soft hair.

The Boss meets his glassy eyes then and he seems to--no, he understands her earlier moment of confusion, and opens his mouth to pinch two clawed fingers over his tongue, like dropping off a pill. So he took the dose they handed him like a good little soldier, and now he's giving the briefing she just requested, given his limitations. 

"Or maybe they doped you so you wouldn't resist me. Either way is an insult to both of us, Fifty-One. I've read your records; you've never been anything but cooperative. You're more dedicated to the purpose than they are. That they don't recognize a good faith effort is an _injustice."_

The Boss knows she's better at inspirational and/or educational speeches than she is at small talk, but it's hard to put a stop to things once they've started. The cat-man nods a slow agreement with her thesis--or her confidence in it--but there's a brief freeze when she calls him by his serial number.

"You're smarter than you let them know, Fifty-One. And I know that isn't your name," she agrees. Putting her arm around his shoulders makes the chains clink musically. He's tremulous, and it's a toss-up whether it's chills, nerves, or the purring again, until she moves in closer and wraps her other arm around his chest. He closes his eyes, but keeps his own hands so carefully to himself, arms crossed in front of him.

There's a bed in this cage, an institutional single that looks like it was thrown in as an afterthought. It's not even placed where Number 51's chains will let him reach it, so the Boss can only imagine what kind of consummation the scientists were anticipating. Maybe she was supposed to shriek and run out long before this, maybe put a run in her stockings and break a heel in the process. Regardless, there's a twin bed here now, and moving it the few yards so it's next to the climbing structure is nothing at all like packing a three-man resupply of gear and ordnance deep in-country, so she'll live.

Moving Number 51 onto the bed is even easier; his legs are shaky but when she pulls him up he tries to stand and move with her, even though his eyes look panicked when he can manage to focus on her face. He's got one fuzzy paw--no, a hand, on her arm to steady himself, claws held in, but it's light, like he's afraid _she'll_ lash out. He meows quietly, in uncertainty or distress, as he totters.

"Shh," the Boss tells him, setting him carefully down. She rolls him off of his back, and the mounting point of that overly-cautious chain, to work on the buckles on the side. From the wear on the leather holes, this has been borrowed from a much larger cat. "I'm not going to take advantage," she says, and for a moment feels like an actor from one of those training films about how not to wear out your welcome with the civilians abroad.

Well, neither of them have arrived here in recognition of their communication skills. Number 51 does look like he's been here too long to believe her, eyes moist and his purring breaths rapid, more obvious with his thin chest exposed. He's almost furred where the classic androgenic hair distribution would be, like his body's second attempt at keeping warm where flesh wouldn't stick.

Moving her hand under the straps to take off his harness, he's warm and shuddering, his heartbeat rabbiting under her palm as a fast counterpoint to the purr. She spends too long a moment there, feeling his warmth, and he turns his head toward her, meeting her eyes at last. His are shiny with unshed moisture.

"I heard that they call you 'Fraidy Cat,'" she says, and is treated to a wavering trill and another of those abashed smiles, fangs and all. "It was meant fondly, but I know you're not a coward, either." The Boss takes off her boots and lays herself down next to him on the single bed. She's still in her fatigues, about the same way she'd carefully show a rescued friendly that her safety was on, and he barely stiffens for a moment as she slots herself into the small space, neither moving in too closely nor making an absurd show of avoiding his naked body. "Do you want the blankets?"

He nods his paw-hand in a fist, nodding his head a split second after that. 

"That's your 'yes,'" the Boss notes out loud, and tucks them both in, blanket up to his chest. 

Her correct observation gets another _yes_ paw-nod. "And this is your 'no,'" she continues, pinching her two fingers and thumb the way she had seen Number 51 confer with his handler on whether he needed to go back in the cage, "away from the scary lady" heavily in the eye-darting subtext.

Number 51 confirms her recollection with another _yes_ gesture, then pauses and makes the _no_ gesture, then closes his eyes. She can tell he's slogging through his chemical fog, and when he opens his eyes he shakes a _yes_ with his right paw-hand, pointing to it with his left with a smile, broad like you'd telegraph to a child. Next he pinches a _no_ with his left paw, pointing at it with his right.

She can't help but laugh at the exaggerated frown he makes to underscore the _no,_ and her laughing makes his grimace give way to a smile with only the short stop at affronted dignity that his cat heritage demands. He makes the syringe-poke sign to his arm again, and rolls his eyes. 

_Give me some slack; I'm medicated._

"You know, when you aren't making that face, you're very handsome." 

That gives him another _no_ to sign, which she rebuts by gently taking his paw-hand, uncurling the fingers and giving it a courtly kiss. He twists his body a little bit, as nervous as a debutante, but he's still purring and his sweet smile comes back. With the certainty of a professional soldier, the Boss knows she's won herself the benefit of the doubt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from _Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There._


	6. the name that you never will guess

The Boss doesn't sleep that night, on her first date with her cat-man.

She's not Number 51's first paramour, although when tells her his version of what his file calls a "failed mating," it sounds more like an abduction and a cage match, heavy on the biting. Whatever they ask of him, he gives, so there could be any number of volunteers with a part of him now, the radius of a refrigerated transport away. He favors her with that sad smile more often than not as they both work to find a common tongue and piece together the little stories that make up his life.

"Do you have a name?"

 _Yes._

"Does anybody else know it?" And of course that's a pause and a _no,_ a sad-but-don't-worry-yourself _no,_ as he pats her arm. His hands have been unkindly documented as "rudimentary," but they make up in strength, and in claws, what they lack in dexterity. The Boss can feel his heat through the pad-like undersides of his fingers and palm, even warmer next to the insulation of the short fur.

By this point, she's in her undershirt, and she takes his hand and holds it flat to her chest. At first it's to feel her heartbeat, and to keep his hands on her, to give him some small measure of control. After a few minutes of staring and purring and aborted movements, she decides she may as well hang for a sheep as a lamb and sheds her top, then shows him exactly where he may and must position his hands.

The Boss has already taken a furlough from his bed to turn the lights down to dusk level. That's the lowest she can go and still be able to see him gesture to her, so now when he looks at her with all the respect she's due, his eyes burn with green fire in the dark. She's used to being looked up to in war, with fear and with a hope for the mercy born of pity, but he looks like a devotee, not a supplicant. Whatever action she may take, Number 51 has already accepted it to be her privilege.

His touch is soft on her breasts, tentative as though she chose to grow them there herself and if he's not properly reverent she might reconsider that decision. The Boss enjoys a moment of this solemnity, then squeezes him in close with her own strong arms, fuzzy hands with soft paw-pads and his equally fuzzy head and all. She doesn't ask him if he ever had anything like a mother; if the answer is yes, it would be a sad and a short one.

He's very conscientious; when his eyes start to close and he absently starts kneading, his claws stay safely in. Even a nocturnal creature with a new friend to talk to can't fight that enforced, pharmaceutical drowsiness forever. Number 51's answers slow down, his gestures vague and drifting until he finally purrs himself to sleep, curled up warm on her naked chest.

It's hard in every way but physical for her to disentangle herself when it's time to go, but as the day staff filter into the cat house, the Boss sneaks off for a tactical siesta in her quarters. She isn't under the jurisdiction of the project's matrons like the other volunteers are, but stealth is a lifelong habit, and it's better not to flaunt your privileges. 

In her fatigues again, last night's activities aren't obvious, even though she's left her undershirt folded up and tucked underneath one of his big, soft hands. It will be easier for everyone if he wakes up alone, and easier on the Boss if she leaves some small token behind. She'll be back.

~(=^‥^)

Refreshed and battle-ready in the early afternoon, it's even less effort for the Boss to pass unnoticed in the hallways of the cat house. Everyone has their place to be, and in her working clothes they assume she does too; she'll have to bring that up as a security concern with the deputy director. Later.

Right now, she's at Number 51's doorway, propped open for air circulation, and she pauses rather than interrupt what would sound like a one-sided conversation, if you didn't know the participants.

"--at least while you're hung over. Hell, we should play poker. Give me a chance for once."

There's a quiet and familiar mew in response, one that sounds equally good humored and long-suffering, and a flapping noise that slides into context as shuffling cards.

"Hey, I _told_ them they didn't have to dope you up. You know how much they listen to either of us, big guy." There's a sigh, lunchroom-loud. "It wasn't bad, right? I mean, she's not my type, personally, but hey, out here. She's... _strong,_ but she's not old, and she's got all her hair and her teeth, and--wait, she didn't hurt you, right? Not like that other time."

Now there's a much longer pause, with some quiet trilling, and the Boss wishes she had a visual on Number 51's paw-gesture take of their evening, especially when his trainer breaks into incredulous laughter.

"You spent the whole night together for the hybrid project and she let you _hug_ her? God damn, Fraidy Cat. You keep moving at that speed, we're going to have to start calling you Casanova."

The Boss determines this is a strategic time to make her appearance, and walks in on Number 51's tech sitting at the table that's built into one side of the cage, dealing out some extremely worn playing cards between the two of them. The ocelot-man has a device in one paw-hand that she's seen used by amputees and burn survivors, two Bakelite discs held together by a spring, and he's taking a moment from sandwiching his cards between them to hide his face and wince. If his ears weren't furry and spotted, she suspects they'd be pink.

Of course, the one with a cat's senses and without his back to the door is the one who sees her first. The Boss appreciates two things: his quiet display of loyalty, as he taps on the table twice to alert his minder, and the way Number 51's ears and tail both perk up when he sees her. His grey-blue eyes are tired, but his smile is genuine.

His tech, on the other hand, flinches, turns to see the Boss, makes the hasty calculation of how high on the bureaucratic threat scale she is, sets the cards down, stands up to show respect for a _lady_ and moves a paper cup of commissary coffee across the table so it looks like he's drinking both of them himself. Attempting to do all of these things at approximately the same time was a poor calculation, but she's across the room in time to catch the deck of cards without having to demonstrate her skill at Fifty-Two Pickup.

Or Thirty-Six Pickup, if this is a Russian deck. Number 51 smiles at her and makes an exaggerated grabbing gesture with his paw-hand, so the Boss picks up the coffee that's still wobbling in its cup (and, adorably, very milky) and repatriates it. He uses both hands to hold the paper cup safely, and drinking it like that makes him look younger, a blond waif and a lost kitten in one. The Boss was never called winsome as a girl, but she imagines this is just what it would look like.

"They're not allowed, ma'am," the tech advises her. There's a canniness obvious on his broad peasant face, when he's not completely committed to toadying for his supervisors. The Boss will accept that kind of social engineering as long as it's in one of her allies.

"I see. I think he's earned an exception. Last night I realized too late that I should have been much more clear with my requirements." It would feel like an insult to talk like this right in front of Number 51, both full humans ignoring the ocelot in the room, but he's staring at her the whole time like he's giving permission. His tail waves slowly behind him in a vertical approximation of his smile. He sets down the cup and reaches out to touch her arm with his furry hand, then pats the table to the side between him and the tech, so of course she sits, and takes the last of the cards from his holder to shuffle.

"What do you boys play?"

"Um, Durak mostly," the tech says, and makes some furtive glances at Number 51. The Boss doesn't turn her head; let them talk. She knows she needs an ally in the man to win the cat-man, and now that she's done her best to explain that she isn't a terrifying symbol of authority and get them off of company manners, their real dynamic is refreshingly egalitarian, as long as you remember who is on which side of the bars. 

"Let's try pai gow, since we have three hands," she suggests, and begins dealing in anticipation of her proposal winning out. There are more flickered eye movements and half-gestures, from both sides, and the Boss very carefully doesn't follow them, to demand or imply a demand for translation. Finally, her cat's minder breaks into speech.

"Ma'am, I'm not a gentleman, but I have a duty to warn you about playing poker with 0051." The cat chuffs a laugh that would sound like a sneeze if she couldn't see his face, and his keeper points at him accusingly. "You have to watch him; you can tell he's got a really good hand if he sits on his tail. He's got a poker _face_ same as anyone, but he plays like he can see right through your cards. Last time we all got out here, he broke the bank and won me six extra days' leave off of Jerzy and Andrezj from the dog house."

She looks where the tech is pointing, praising by faint damn, and Number 51 is smiling like a Cheshire cat-man now. He sets down his cards, fanned out in the holder, and waves a flat paw-hand through the air, on its side and back and forth like it's swimming.

"...and I brought him back a good sack of smoked herring, since it was me who got to _take_ the leave. Just watch out, ma'am. Don't let those ears distract you."

The Boss nods, her own poker face locking into place. The tech has read her in on the strategically correct side of the them-vs-us that is Management and Labor, even in a worker's paradise. Less obviously, he's given her another piece of intel towards something Number 51 was trying to drunkenly pantomime to her, last night when she told him he looked like he'd seen a ghost.


	7. deep and inscrutable singular Name

"You look like you've seen a ghost," she told him after she took off his restraints last night, and didn't mean it unkindly. Glinting green in the dim light, his eyes were an obvious tell; it could have been just the drugs, but something was off. As much as they watched her, always returned to her, he would also lose focus and stare too long over her shoulder or behind her back, the stereotype of a housecat staring at nothing in the corner of the room.

 _Yes,_ he gestured much too quickly, fangs showing in his smile. He thought better of it and closed those lighthouse eyes, trying to regroup. She rubbed his head again; scratching behind his big spotted ears should have been too easy, too much of a cheap dig at being a cat-man, but so far it had been very reliable in making him purr. Now, with his eyes shut, it was making him start to nuzzle.

The Boss wasn't here to interrogate, even before she had found her target compromised. Still, she couldn't resist pursuing this incongruent piece of information, like picking at the unraveling thread in a sweater. "There are ghosts here?" she asked gently, the way she would have asked a new widow about recent troop movements.

 _Yes,_ the cat-man nodded and signed with enthusiasm at being understood. He gestured in a horizontal circle around them--apparently there were _many_ ghosts--then his eyes rolled back and his head lolled, just for a moment, but the purring didn't stop. 

_Your father._ The pantomime was loose and lazy, but broad concepts were easiest: her father, the cat-man explained, was _killed_ by _them,_ with a look and a pointing claw to indicate that it was functionally the same kind of "them" who had made and were keeping Number 51 here. He cocked his head and stared at nothing again, and the Boss couldn't resist looking behind her to confirm that he was staring into empty darkness.

The Boss' turn was was what it took to break the spell; she could see he had more to tell, but had hit the limit of his hand gestures and what he could expect of anyone's patience. Maybe his reluctance to share something so unbelievable had shaken off the drugs and caught up with him at last. Number 51 shook his head and patted her arm in sympathy. He still kept looking to the darkened room around her, but only with quick little eye movements.

The Boss knew all about Clever Hans, the horse that could solve math problems just as long as his trainer was standing there to nod to him. She also knew with deep certainty that this wasn't just an animal in bed next to her. This new wrinkle made it possible she was falling for the classic mystic act, making vague pronouncements and letting your mark suggest what she most wanted to hear. There was also the possibility that a half-cat science experiment who had been raised all alone in a cage by underpaid locals had come unglued in the process and saw strange things at night. 

Neither of these explanations were a dealbreaker, in her opinion. Something else to consider, as well as the possibility that his confession was true. Number 51 was being very sweet about it, and she could tell that he wanted her to drop this subject that he hadn't meant to bring up in the first place.

Unless that had been part of his plan, too, but the Boss was excellent at watching the whole horizon during a tactical engagement.

~(=^‥^)

Pai gow poker goes as strongly in Number 51's favor as the cat-man's trainer, Sergei, had gallantly warned the Boss. If the subject he calls Fraidy Cat does have some form of ESP, or is in contact with spirits of the dead who have nothing better to do than cheat at cards, the Boss doesn't think Sergei knows about it. Another vote in favor of Number 51's confession being real; if he'd been working on a con, letting that ability "accidentally" slip years ago would have made him the star of the lab, meows and paws and all.

The Boss is a practical woman; she has room in her philosophy for talking to ghosts. It slots in right next to talking to bees and being able to photosynthesize, and is much more admirable in a comrade than _pretending_ to talk to ghosts. It would be useful in gathering intelligence, as long as the dead were cooperative. Could they be sent on scouting missions, the perfect spies, or were they too preoccupied with their regrets to be reliably directed? Maybe they were tied to the places they died, but that would still leave them as excellent sources of intelligence. Could the dead be swayed by patriotism and their living duty, or had they gone beyond such things? The Boss' insight into Sergei and the cat's bluffing suffers as she thinks of the branching series of yes/no questions it would take to establish this baseline data.

She thinks again about adding the ocelot-man to her Cobra Unit as she takes her defeat at poker like a soldier. As his minder, Sergei naturally accepts custody of the cat's winnings in the form of US dollars and some medium-quality cigars, and Number 51 lets her hug his sleek body through the bars before she leaves to collect the payment from her quarters.

She sees the tech eyeing her interaction with his charge, and isn't surprised as Sergei follows her out the door of the enclosure.

"Hey, ma'am?" he says, still unsteady in their relative positions. "I think Fraidy Cat really does like you, and... there's a recording you should listen to for that. Alone. Nothing bad," he adds quickly. "It's a nature thing, with wild ocelots, yeah? Fraidy Cat has always been a real trooper, always, and we could just run the tape when you're there, like we do when the lab wants samples from him, but I think it'd probably help him figure things out if you could do the noises yourself. He'd probably really appreciate it, I think."

The Boss thanks Sergei for his insight before he's able to get more than one low growl into his demonstration. It's very helpful, but there are other people in the hallway.

~(=^‥^)

After more cards, and some in-person drills on Number 51's paw-signs, she carries the tape recorder to her room and reviews it like it's captured intel. The Boss is pleased to discover that the demands of an amorous lady ocelot, midway between liquid trills and murderous grumbling, are not impossible for the human voicebox, especially if you warm up as one of course should before any exercise. She has always impressed preparation on those under her command, and spends time over the next few days practicing in her quarters before she ever shows off to her cat.

He's grown accustomed to her presence in the cage that passes for his territory, and attached enough to perk up when she enters. The Boss has been bringing along little gifts, consciously avoiding food—her cat is not an _animal_ \--and since he showed her his two-book library with such guarded pride, she's brought him the most adult books she can find at his reading level. Tonight it's a hard-bound collection of myths and fairy tales for children, to fit next to the well-worn primers that Number 51 keeps in a crevice under his wooden log climbing structure.

He didn't have any more, he explains with hand gestures and later, with the carpenter pencil she brings him, because he was removed from formal schooling when they determined he was _NOt good 4 fiteng._ They also didn't lend him any in his cage because of his _dumm Cat fngers._ The books are there for everyone in the lab to share, after all. The Boss notes torn and battered edges to his primers, but they aren't in bad shape for childhood artifacts, especially a child who grew up with claws.

Number 51 holds the new book carefully with both paw-hands, horizontal at first to read the title, then clutching it closer to his body. The Boss moves herself in, then, and as he frees up one hand to sign a _thank you,_ she pushes the book aside to put herself in that embrace.

The musical growls that she learned from the recording are a help to conquer the doubts and apprehensions that are the burden of any thinking being, even more so her valiant but inexperienced ocelot-man. Her first few ardent trills make his grey-blue eyes widen, and he takes a ready stance, heartbeat picking up along with all the normal human signs, plus tail, pointing to an impending flight reaction. 

The Boss knows he's stronger than she is, but only physically. Her unflinching will to survive in battle is easily expanded to the battle to carry on the human species, with the addition of fangs and claws. The Boss watches his reaction to her cat-calls until she can determine that her new technique is no less sporting than bright lipstick and a short skirt when hunting the general-issue male. She can tell this isn't rejection, only hesitation, and she knows she has the strength to force the moment to its crisis. 

He's starting to reply to her caterwauls with tentative growls, so she chases them with a kiss. His tongue is textured, but not painfully rough, and for a man who can't speak he still knows how to use it; most importantly, he's ready to take direction. 

~(=^‥^)

They're lying in the narrow bed, wrapped around each other as much as the cooldown will allow, when she inclines her head to her cat-man and asks again about his name. His real one, the one he's chosen; the one that she'll keep to herself as scrupulously as he does. The name of the father of her child, who will also of course deserve more than a number. Number 51 looks sheepish as he finally tells her, tracing it onto her callused hand with the careful pad of a finger, claw sheathed.

 _SORROW_ he writes, precise about the spelling, and the Boss smiles, pulling his head to her chest. More than ever, she knows she made the right decision, and she needs to return the favor, telling him all about her Cobras and her own self-chosen name.

"That's perfect," she assures him, "and I'd like to give you a name in return. An addition, not a replacement. In the legends of King Arthur," she starts, and is pleased to see recognition in his eyes as she draws on her boarding school education, "there was a knight called Tristan, whose name was very like the Latin for _'sad,'_ and his story is a story of love balanced with duty."

She recounts the tale of doomed and timeless romance while he listens, rapt, and then she tells him more about her own Round Table, where the Sorrow would be nicely inconspicuous among the rest of her knights, all working together for the Joy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Boss isn't entirely accurate as she recalls her junior high curriculum, but it's close enough for government work. At this point in her career, she's backburnered the liberal arts in favor of a body of knowledge that is useful for punching people in the face, or leading a small group of weirdos who shoot crossbows and hornets in those people's faces.
> 
> Anonymous comments are on; any comments, criticism or typo catches are welcomed.


	8. name that no human research can discover

All but one of Sorrow's friends are dead.

That's really not as tragic as it sounds. He only met them after they were dead already, and it's only the spirits of the dead who can hear him speak, really speak like a person. He can understand them, too, even if they had different languages in life; it's kind of like hearing an unofficially dubbed movie, with the translation just laid over the existing soundtrack, except no sound and no language at all. He figures he sounds about the same to the spirits, a clear voice over his silence and occasional quiet mew.

Sorrow hasn't actually seen any kind of movie, not personally. That's fine; the spirits of the dead have seen them, and the dead have a lot of time on their hands to tell him stories. He likes to listen to them, to the secondhand plots of movies, and books, and the comedies and tragedies of thousands of mundane lives remembered. He's never been entertained by Great Caesar's ghost, digressing on what he should have done differently with the whole Republic thing, but he did spend a few weeks taking a comprehensive World History course from an impassioned professor who was having a hard time reconciling himself to his myocardial infarction. 

Sorrow was even engrossed by all the details about a feud with the butcher, and how the newly-late Mrs. Wysocki at last proved the scales were rigged in front of most of the town including that awful Widow Sawicki who at least could be trusted to blab to _everyone_ all about the scandal they had missed--that's a compelling story if you've never been to a store in your life. Or to a town, or to anywhere that isn't a secret research facility. 

Telling that story to an interested audience meant so much to the spirit of Mrs. Wysocki. She faded away a few days afterward, gone to wherever it is that the dead go when they're finally done with the living world. Sorrow thinks it must be a good place they go to next. The dead only leave him when they're good and ready, their Earthly attachments resolved in one way or another, so they must be getting prepared for something more peaceful, at least. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about. Sorrow is aware that he doesn't live in a just world, but he can't imagine it's part of a whole unjust universe. 

Sorrow's not-dead friend is his main handler, Sergei, who looks at Sorrow mostly like a person and has been interested in learning the paw-signs Dr. E taught Sorrow, back when 51 was a kitten-boy with potential and wasn't the disappointingly unusable Subject 0051. He supposes you could count Dr. E, as well as Sergei's coworkers who come by some nights, as friendly acquaintances. Nobody _dislikes_ their "Fraidy Cat," and Sorrow has to be philosophical about having that name, too. It was given with relief and spread with genuine affection, which makes it tolerable to have the motivations of "Prudent Laboratory Captive Since Birth Cat" so badly misinterpreted.

Sorrow has done his very best to be cooperative, since the very earliest days when he could remember listening to the spirits' advice, so he's glad that that much has made it through the language barrier. He has his own tiny territory now, and even though they made it of unmistakable barred walls, he still feels the deep and inarguable need to _claim_ it. Being an adult, and being Fraidy Cat, is about making compromises. Sorrow urinates exclusively in the tankless metal toilet they've given him, and when the urges get bad, he rubs his body on the bars and the bed and the chair and the bolted-together logs until they smell like him, just not in a way anyone who isn't a cat would notice and get upset by. 

It takes a lot longer than doing it how his instincts want him to, but this way nobody starts writing memos about his Behavioral Issues, and it's not like Sorrow doesn't have time on his paws, too.

~(=^‥^)

The spirits of the dead are entertaining to talk to. They know so many things, but disconnected from the rhythms of life as they are, they're not timely sources of information. That isn't usually a problem; one day is also a lot like another for a cat-man who isn't high up on anyone's priorities, and the plans that do involve him take a long time to clear the horizon. Spirits drift through on their own orbital paths; Sorrow knows better now how not to make a cattle call with a loud, strong emotion. There are so many angry dead out there, very excited to be listened to, and even more hopeful that someone who can hear them might also not want to use his flesh body for a little while and they could borrow Sorrow's paw-hands and his intriguing claws to work some change on whatever they're still angry about. He's gotten good at keeping those spirits out, even if talking them through their anger is an ongoing project.

Sorrow has participated in more than his share of animal-people drug trials; he's a good enough sport to take an injection without hissing and to keep working his hardest at putting the pegs in the holes while the scientists hold a stopwatch. He's not useful at much else, so it's no big hit to the lab's productivity if Subject 0051 is seasick for a couple of days. The scientists tell him they appreciate his cooperation, or "thanks for helping us out, big guy," depending, and the worst Sorrow's had from it is a tossup between nausea, hives, and the time he fell off the treadmill and woke up with a black eye. 

_That_ tranquilizer is the formula the scientists use in the dart guns, now; there was something scribbled on a clipboard about "rapid onset," and that occasioned a sensible celebration in the laboratory that evening. There was a lightly poached river _leszcz,_ too, the crunchy head with its nice salty eyeballs left on, specially cooked for the subject of that successful test as soon as he finally did wake up, having slept through everyone else's dinner. As befits a successful trial, Subject 0051 demonstrated mild dizziness on regaining consciousness but was no less reliably cooperative with his handlers. They understand him, Sorrow knows, as a kind of caricature of a human person, and he rewards the version of kindness he receives with the kind of politeness and gratitude they can understand as well.

Other than assisting with applied chemistry, Sorrow doesn't have a whole lot in his datebook. Nobody takes him out to train with guns or bombs or trucks, but he gets to jump and climb through the fenced-in part of Outside, as long as Sergei finds a time that nobody else is using it. Sorrow understands that part of keeping the privilege, as a failed research subject, is coming back in the first time you're called. He understands something by Sergei watching him, too, and knows that another reason he keeps getting to return is because it's obvious just how much Sorrow enjoys running up a real live tree trunk, then jumping to land with his paw-feet in soft grass. That real joy is an emotion he doesn't have to keep tamped down, and that's also part of why Sergei counts as his only living friend.

Sorrow gets to use the pool on about that catch-as-catch-can schedule, too. Real cat ocelots in Nature love the water, same as tigers and jaguars do, but just like a huge, beautiful tiger swimming makes for better wildlife photography than an overgrown housecat with its mouth stuffed full of fish, so do the various combat-ready jaguar- and tiger-people here in the cat house just get penciled in for more time in the pool than Sorrow does. That's OK; he understands. He would have no problem with sharing, like he did when they were kitten-children instead of cat-people, but back then the scientists had already looked worried when they splashed and laughed and ducked each other under the water, even though Sorrow could swim just fine almost from the beginning and the biggest tiger-boy, 63, always made sure everyone came back up afterward.

In between these little diversions, Sorrow drifts along in a timeless day-to-day that suits him and the dead well; they have all the time in the world. Space, too. There may be some spirits who are tied to the place they died or the place their bones are lying, but he hasn't met any of them yet, for the obvious reason. He may already have met spirits who are fettered by the walls of the cat house and not realized it, since Sorrow can't exactly leave either.

~(=^‥^)

In retrospect, the day-to-day was getting a little less timeless right before he met her. Gossip had been trickling in from the spirits of the subjects and researchers, the dead who were still invested in the project, although Sorrow had been preoccupied by gently orienting a newly-deceased handler who still couldn't believe that he'd died, of all things, while trying to secure semen from an indignant bear-man.

The late tech was overly apologetic to Sorrow, in his position as a representative of all animal-man-kind, but Sorrow and his Greek chorus of laboratory spirits couldn't really think of any specific instances of injustice, or any injustices that had been specific to that one tech. _It's a living_ was the quiet consensus, and Sorrow could feel the confused, manic energy of the bear handler begin to ebb away. He was starting to unlatch from the world--and oddly enough, in the background so was 33, the slow, sad spirit of a seal-boy Sorrow had known since his own childhood. 33 had been heading toward this for a long time, barely present as a faint marine feeling, a set of big, deep eyes, so Sorrow was pleased for him to be moving on at last, even if he was sad to lose a companion.

Sorrow thinks this over through dinner, and after, when Sergei suggests they get him cleaned up for the VIPs tomorrow. It's not like he's doing anything else, and they can't sneak out to the pool after hours when everyone's on their best behavior for an inspection. He's a little distracted, but he tends to be; all he has to do that shows in the physical world is smile and cooperate, and not being fully present has been helpful with that. 

The spirits are starting to get more energetic, besides, and that's always interesting. As he lets the clippers make their loud, mechanical purr around his head, Sorrow drifts among the dead. There are a whole lot more travelers arriving, spirits present on all different levels from vague feelings of unrest to fully-present consciousnesses, and they're making the locals anxious. Some of the scientists and sometimes the more hands-on generals have an entourage of spirits following them, and of course there are always people who have a dead family member trailing behind, but this is like a train pulling up to the station. A troop transport, as he starts to talk to the ones who are present in time enough to speak, and from what he can gather from the more inchoate spirits as they accumulate into a _feeling_.

Sorrow is transfixed, pulled closer to the rush of spirits as he slowly disconnects from himself; there are just so many of them. Soldiers, then the kind who would proudly call themselves warriors. They're all here by the same cause, if not the same reason, all conveyed from the physical world and partway to the next by the same hand. They can't pass through for the same reason, out of awe or anger or relief all owed to the same fixed point at the center of the maelstrom of the dead.

It's like a tide that Sorrow's barely standing upright in, when he's used to wading through a still lake, a slow river. There are more and more of the dead, stronger and more alert and aware as though something's approaching, and it is: their epicenter, this axis between worlds they're circling around. The angry, the vengeful, the vague and just-plain-complaining dead give way to an even stronger inner circle that's holding them at bay. These are dead men--mostly men, nearly all in uniforms--spirits standing tall and with their egos and their agency intact. These spirits are happy to be here, palpably full of pride in purpose; they didn't fall at her hand but standing beside her, and they'll follow her in their half-world until it's time to follow her into the next.

_Her,_ they tell him with all of their being, and then the door opens on the physical plane and Sorrow finally sees their _her,_ too. She's tall and strong and beautiful like the sun is beautiful: a universal force, the inarguable, fundamental center of everything around her, as well as something he can't look at directly for too long. She'd pull him in with her gravity, take him into her orbit like all of the rest of them, despite his solid flesh. She'll burn herself into his eyes until he's unable to see anything but her.

He _wants_ that, too, so it's probably for the best that Sergei chooses that moment to try to shave off one of Sorrow's goddamn ears again. Brought back into the world, Sorrow can avert his eyes from her for just the moment it takes until he's fully occupying his physical body again. She's come closer in that time; her honor guard of spirits are surrounding him, too, but he's as ready as anyone can be for his assumption.


	9. dóbroye slóvo i kóshke priyátno

He hears them approaching, of course. Even human ears would wake up with that door creaking open, but part of being a good subject is in not being too proactive, and letting the real humans tell you what they want from you, first. There's a minute or so after the footsteps stop that might be an awkward pause, so Sorrow rolls over and stretches, then eases himself down from his sleeping perch to lie prone on a lower part of the climbing structure. It's sort of his Cheshire Cat pose, without as much threat; it's been very reassuring in the past to nervous visitors who thought they might be pounced on and shredded.

Sorrow chirps a greeting-and-question at the two techs, whom he vaguely recognizes but doesn't usually run into. Specialists, maybe, but there's also the possibility his usual minder Sergei was left out of whatever today's activities might be. Sergei has made small but valid objections to plans involving 0051 in the past, and honestly, that makes Sorrow worried for him. Sergei is a free man by the usual reckoning, but there are so many more humans than there are animal-people, even disappointing animal-people. It's easy for a human to disappear.

Today, there wasn't the telltale rattling of heavy metal on tiny wheels in the hallway that means a rack or a cage is coming. The unfamiliar techs don't have anything big they can't hide, like nets or control poles, with them, so whatever he's about to put up with, it's probably nothing he can't handle. Sorrow is wary, but keeps his muscles loose, his body language neutral and friendly, waiting on a briefing from the people who outrank him and are also the only ones capable of speech.

"So OK, kitty. You got a date pretty soon, with a lady. You already met her; it's the lady you already saw, and she ended up picking you out of everybody. Nice lady, right, with pretty yellow hair. You like her? We're just here to make sure the nice lady's not gonna get herself hurt." One of the techs has elected himself spokesperson, and the other one seems relieved. He's being very careful not to confuse a dumb animal, although his explanatory hand gestures of course aren't the same ones Sorrow was taught.

Still, Sorrow agrees, as much as he's certain she can take care of herself with much more dangerous foes than him. He also agrees that she seems like a nice lady, the way fire seems a little bit hot. He slowly shows his claws and then retracts them, folding his paw-hands together and nodding his head. He's pretty sure it says Low Risk right on his chart, and he's pretty sure they know that.

"Oh no, of course you wouldn't hurt her on purpose." The tech puts his hand on the log right next to Sorrow and leans. He doesn't seem scared, which is good. Both of the techs are still armed, with the usual hotshots but also tranq pistols, so today might be a big day after all. "You just don't gotta lot of experience. It's OK, kitty-cat! Everybody's got to learn sometimes. It's just that it's kinda easy to get excited when you're with a lady. That's only natural."

The tech still isn't saying anything out loud that Sorrow doesn't agree with, so he nods pleasantly and waits for the other shoe to drop, keeping the innocent face of a cooperative little subject who has no clue that something's coming up and is just hanging on every word from the human. He's lived here too long not to know that's how it goes. The other tech is quiet, shifting his weight minutely from foot to foot, and both of the men seem aware of things in their pockets, even if they aren't keeping their hands unconsciously near their weapons.

Sorrow isn't exactly getting worried, since there isn't much he can do to affect the outcome, but he can still try to make things easier for everyone. He sticks his claws out again, just on one paw this time, and mimes filing them with a bit of a question on his face.

"Yeah, you got it, kitty!" The talkative tech smiles, and looks back for a moment at the nervous one; _see?_ "You got it just right. We're just here to _help_ you be careful; that's all. First thing, though, is you gotta come down from there so we can get you out of your pajamas. We're gonna help you get _all_ ready for her."

~(=^‥^)

By the time she arrives, he's almost gone. Even with his lab cat experience, Sorrow couldn't tell you which drug they picked for him, but the effects are familiar enough. It's one of the difficult ones. He's awake but he floats and nods, lazily unconcerned that his doors of perception are being held open with a brick. On a normal day, Sorrow's friendly spirits are quiet company, but this is the kind of thing that makes the rowdy ones start coming around, hoping for an inroad to a body. He can barely summon the effort to wave them off, after first working up the energy to remind himself that he does need to care.

What are they going to do that's worth a damn with his dumb mouth, these barely-hands? With someone else at the helm, Sorrow's body could do damage, could rend flesh and break bone, but none of the dead can use him to tell anyone's secrets. Even simple-minded vengeance with claws and fangs would be difficult right now, since he's chained up and muzzled, so Sorrow at least feels like he's safe to relax a little and let himself drift in and out of space and time, gentle practice for when he's finally dead too.

Sorrow has been taken away to meet a woman before. The techs had been laughing as they led him down the hallway with a chain around his neck, and told him just what he was going to do that night with an air of congratulation. Then she, the spotted _she_ back then, had told him what he was _not_ going to do, and he had understood her perfect human words and her inhuman body language. He had already retreated, as far as he could get from her territory while locked inside of it; she really hadn't had to use her perfect cat teeth, too. Sorrow does understand why someone would want to be very clear about that, though. Some of the dead have told him their stories. Mostly women, the kind who didn't have claws and fangs when it happened to them. He thinks they'll understand how he's anticipating and dreading this, and feeling nothing at all at the same time, and how he's not sure if it's better or worse that it's going to be someone he has feelings for. Could have feelings for, if he were as much a person as she is.

And then, at last, she comes for him. 

She's radiant with life at the head of her army of the dead, filling her lieutenants with clear-eyed purpose that fills out their spirit bodies as they were in life, and filters through down to the wispy and inchoate camp-followers around them. She touches him in this world with her warm and perfect human hands, moves his body with as much authority as the techs did, but it's not like he even wants to fight against her will. She plucks off his fetters and then picks him up and puts him right where she wants him, and it's all Sorrow can do to stay with her in this world, not melt into a puddle of loose muscles and empty mind. 

She's surrounded by the devoted dead and Sorrow is ready, half-expecting one of those loyal spirits to step in and shoulder the burden of his disappointing body, pilot it into formation under her command. Instead, they surround him again too, and his own burden is lifted. The unquiet ones, all the dead voices clamoring for revenge and recognition and undirected violence stop, pushed back by the spirit host around her that she doesn't even see herself. They give Sorrow a peace like he's never known, to be a purely physical being underneath another physical being, and after all of that, she puts him carefully to bed, held in her strong, soft arms like someone who is loved.

He can't stop himself and tells her everything the second she asks, everything about himself and about the spirits, which Sorrow knows that nobody else really needs to know about. Talking too much isn't usually a problem he has; nobody asks Sorrow complicated questions, and nobody much listens for the answers. She listens--watches, OK, she watches his dumb paw-hands try to explain, but she listens to his noises too, the hint of a smile on her stern, noble face when the best answer he can give her is a little cat mew.

After all of that, she doesn't even take from him the one thing she came here for. When he wakes up he's tucked under blankets in the real-human bed with his mouth bone-dry and his head still a little bit swimmy. He's not surprised that she left in the night, but he notices that she's left a little token of her presence. 

Kaciaryna, one of his usual spirits who've taken to giving him what she calls Relationship Advice, tells him that _she_ liked to leave an embroidered handkerchief with a little dab of perfume behind for a beau, but she does realize that her wild days were almost a century ago, and besides, this new friend of his seems like she's more of a sporty girl. It's probably the same intent; Kaciaryna still thinks it's thoughtful of her. Sorrow has a plain human nose on his face but a cat's good sense of smell behind it; he's glad there isn't any perfume on this token to overpower the natural scent. Breathing that in is already reminding him of spending last night with her body next to him, strong and unafraid and so kind to the conquered.

Sorrow is very careful not to snag the plain cotton undershirt with his claws, and hides it, folded up next to his skin, after he puts his own shirt on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _dóbroye slóvo i kóshke priyátno:_ Russian, even a cat likes kind words.


	10. ne schulen habbe na beast bute cat ane

She doesn't wait until night to come back, to take her due from a fully-present subject. She comes back that afternoon, while he's nursing a hangover, and plays cards with Sorrow and his minder Sergei like she's always been here. She comes back day after day in the daytime, too, and the quiet hours at night when only Sorrow and the other cats are awake. She brings him books and doesn't mind that his reading starts off slowly, or how long he likes to take poring over the photos in the _National Geographic._ He's heard so many stories from the spirits, but there's so much of the world he's never seen. She's been in a forest and she's been in a jungle, and she's caught more animals to eat or feed her men than he's ever held in his own unbloodied paws.

She brings him paper and crayons and then grease pencils, and doesn't make fun of his bad spelling and his even worse penmanship. Her strong, capable hand is dwarfed by his stupid furry paw but they make the loops together at her steady direction, and don't do anything more prurient than sit almost in each other's laps. Sorrow's embarrassed: he can't seem to ever stop himself purring, but even that dead giveaway isn't what it takes to make her come to her senses about the animal she's courting.

She keeps coming back, until she comes by night to their concrete-walled Eden and she brings knowledge with her. Sorrow is taken aback to hear _those_ noises coming from a living being, let alone her perfect human throat. He freezes and everything lurches to a stop like he's in a waking dream that's on its way to being a nightmare, but in a second he can breathe again, slotted back into his body and feeling his pounding heartbeat and the sweat on the back of his neck. 

Time restarts with her arms around him. Sorrow can tell now that it really is her voice making the ocelot calls; for one thing, her accent is atrocious, although that isn't stopping his cat instincts from making themselves known, the same way they do with the hundredth repetition of the same old tape. That's probably the same recording she's learned it from, too; he recognizes parts of it, but she's growling and trilling them in a different order from the one he's heard so many times. Maybe a real ocelot would think she's reading random lines from the phrasebook of a language she doesn't speak, but Sorrow's beginning to think it's more like music, and what she's doing is jazz. He realizes he's making the noises too, his own liquid growling counterpoint to her melody, and it's not his imagination: her eyes light up when they harmonize.

The cat in him, that inconvenient, primitive thing, knows what it wants to be doing. It makes him worry because so far in his life, every time _those_ instincts have urged him toward something it was the wrong thing to do. Well, not the wrong thing, necessarily, but it wasn't what the scientists wanted. Being owned by someone else, Sorrow knows, means one more level of self-analysis before you act, unless you don't mind the hose, the electric prod _and_ people being disappointed in you.

This is probably a terrible idea, but he lets himself melt into her arms, and when she kisses him, he melts into her mouth, too. Both of their rumbling yowls join in a vibration that meets at the lips and teeth. He's grappling with her as much as she is with him, now, but they're both fighting to get closer to the other, like they can't believe they're on the same side. He's licking her, chest and neck and face as different parts are closer and further to reach, and as they strike him in the moment as looking the most _tasty._ They've never liked him licking things, even himself, in the very same way they don't like him marking his territory, but she's making it very clear that there's no punishment forthcoming. 

Even if she had a rod or a whip in her hand, he wouldn't be afraid of her now; whatever she does is right, and there's no reason to fear the inexorable. She carries an innate authority that the scientists have to use threats and electric shocks to even approach, and there's a change in her taste and smell as he licks her skin that tells that primordial cat brain that everything is perfect. Wrapped around her, he has another strange, jungle feeling, and before he knows it, Sorrow's got his mouth clamped on her neck. He doesn't want to tear her skin away and watch her bleed, but that's the perfect amount of flexion he feels burning in his jaw as his tongue feels his fangs dimple the flesh of her meaty trapezius. 

That could be finally too much, the monster come to light at last. Sorrow has another moment's flash of fear and oncoming regret, which is when he feels her throat under his teeth and her broad shoulders shake.

"Surprised yourself, didn't you?" she laughs, and rubs behind his ears like he's still an innocent cat-boy and a Good Subject. "You didn't hurt me, and it'll take a lot more than that to scare me. You're only half done," and then he's following her finger without thinking, to gnaw on the other side of her neck, right where she pointed.

It's so hard to keep thinking about consequences with her here next to him. With her holding him down, literally grounding him to this world, this bed, there's nothing else that exists enough to worry about. She lets him wrap his big dumb paws around her strong human body and hold on like a sailor to the mast in a storm, and there's nothing else beyond the two of them. She's stalwart enough for both of them and doesn't mind that he's skinny and bendy, doesn't mind the animal fur on his chest rubbing against her perfect hairless breasts.

She doesn't laugh at his penis, and Sorrow _knows_ they don't look like that on a real human. She holds on to him firmly but gently, with nothing to prove. The way she says "now that's interesting" makes it clear she's not being cruel; what her fingers are doing goes a really long way towards confirming that she means what she said. She moves her hands to herself after a while of that, then leads his own into position, ignoring the risk of his claws, and helps outline what he should study next.

When they're hot and damp and tired and glad, there's time again to talk. Sorrow's tongue, the metaphorical one, is loosened like it was when he was doped to the gills and she was a stranger, but now he's happy to answer her questions, and she can understand so much more of his answers. She doesn't even laugh at his secret name, the silly one he gave himself as a kitten-boy, that only he and the spirits know. He traces it out on her hand with one of his big dumb paw-fingers, claw carefully retracted. She looks at him and narrows her eyes and laughs, short and sudden, but it's a happy laugh, and one he wants to join in. He's never liked how his laugh sounds like a meow, but it just seems to make her happier when she hears it. 

Instead of telling him that naming himself was a childish thing, and naming himself _that_ was even sillier, she assures him she knows some people she really wants him to meet, and gives him her own chosen name to keep safe in return. Hers is a whole lot better, both because it's also a real human name, and because she's got a handful of the living who call her that, too. She has another real human name she wants to give him, and he nearly cries at such a gift. 

She's his Boss, she's his Joy; Sorrow, _Tristan_ couldn't have done any better than what she did for herself. He's not as strong as her; as much as he gave himself a name like he was a human boy, he still gave it to himself, and this is the first time he's ever heard it from a living mouth. By how he was known to the world, Sorrow was more Fraidy Cat than he ever, ever was Sorrow, but now he's Tristan, handed from the highest authority he's ever met.

She tells him more about her Cobra Unit after that. They sound like a strange group, or a group of strange people, but Tristan is a half-cat semi-failed research project who talks to the dead, and doesn't mean any disrespect with his assessment. It's more hopeful. When his Joy tells him that she wants him for her own, wants him out of the facility to stand by her side, it sounds like she might even manage to do that, and that she'd really have a place for him.

He thinks he could fight for her, too, could _hurt_ people with his claws and his teeth and those cat instincts that he's always tamping down. Fight with the instincts, instead of against them. If she were there to direct him, she could remind him that he was still a person afterward. With someone stronger to make sure that it was him in his body and not something that's come back for the grave for blood and vengeance, Tristan thinks he could fight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _ne schulen habbe na beast bute cat ane:_ ME, from the [_Ancrene Wisse,_](http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hasenfratz-ancrene-wisse-introduction) you may keep no animal but a single cat. 
> 
> The link to the annotated text above makes an important point: you can tell what anchoresses usually got up to by what the text takes care to warn them specifically against. Anyway, one cat is _fine._


	11. the name that the family use daily

Of course, it takes much more than one try to make a baby, and in the days that pass they spend some more time trying things that even Tristan knows won't make a baby at all. It ends up worthwhile all the same to follow his Boss' lead. She's so full of power about her own direction that he can't see any reason he'd do otherwise. He surrenders as surely as if she had the loop of the control pole around his neck or if she were the spirit wearing his skin, and it's terrifying and not at the same time.

Tristan's writing is getting better, in the sense that you can tell what all the letters are supposed to be. What's even more amazing is that he keeps finding confirmation that he's not just his Joy's convenient plaything, bumped up one step from child-getter due to cooperation and well-groomed fur. She's genuinely pleased as he reads his simple books to her. Not out loud, obviously, but he slowly drags one blunt paw-finger across the line, nudging her cheek when he ends a paragraph or when he needs to hear her perfect human voice say a word out loud. (Sometimes it's more of a "need," but she seems to understand, and to be OK with that, too.)

His Boss does like to teach, she says. She'd never have _settled_ for being a teacher, one of the few things her world has approved as Women's Work, but she loves to work and see the people around her also working, and growing stronger. Her own people, especially.

Some of Tristan's usual spirits argue themselves into a flurry, annoyed that she rejects their lives' calling like that, which puts Tristan in the predicament of explaining her brusque dismissal. His Boss has taken every drawback she was born with and shoved it right back down her people's throats, which is one more way she's better than he'll ever be, but she's still a little bit sensitive about all the nonsensical restrictions they try to assign her. She'd never, ever call herself sensitive, though, and Tristan thinks her sex wouldn't be any kind of a problem if it were a just world, but again, nobody wants the opinion of the scrawny half-wildcat and the female soldier cuddling in an iron cage.

"TEACHER-FEMALE GHOSTS ANGRY WHAT-YOU-SAID" is what he ends up paw-signing, more or less, when she puts her hand on his face and asks him where he's gone off to, just then. She nods understanding, then asks him if he's all right. That's all she wants to know: is _he_ feeling all right, not is he going to faint if they keep running the tests and screw up the rest of the night's data. 

Despite the loaded implications, she's still good at teaching. Since she's spent her whole life fighting, it naturally follows that she should teach him that too, in between their language lessons, talking, and of course the other way that she's great at using her body and his. His Joy is happy to show Tristan how to use his natural strength and flexibility in the system she's devising, her very own close quarters combat technique. She lets him keep his claws sheathed while they grapple and she tries out holds, just so long as he promises her that in a real fight he'll use every advantage that he can. 

Tristan is made from most of the good parts of an ocelot and is every inch a mammal, so he enjoys the wrestling and the closeness, even if he's still shy of turning all it back on her, and his Boss really isn't encouraging the right lesson by what she does to him after she pins him. This isn't a problem that they have when she leads the other volunteer mothers in physical training exercises, she grumbles good-naturedly while he's got his face happily squeezed between her thighs. Although she has noticed a few of them who always seem to choose each other to spar. She says it's good to have a comrade, and that she thinks none of them have found a man here, not like she has.

~(=^‥^)

There are these distractions, but he does his best to support her mission here. Within her strong, human body, it succeeds. His Joy tells him the good news first, and later that day the scientists confirm it, while Tristan worries about her in their clutches. Making part-cat babies has been difficult, he knows, even with the human women who are putting their all into it for this generation. He'd like to see his Joy disappear in the middle of the night, to nurture their child in some far-away human place with her will and her friends and her guns. He also thinks back to all the complications he knows about, ones that have happened even to the people and semi-people who were a few doors down from an operating room when they felt a twinge inside.

The spirits of the worst-case-scenarios are all around him; some that couldn't have been helped and some that maybe could have, but these experts agree that it's safer for her and the fetus to stay here, at least as far as them both living goes. Tristan doesn't want to think about her child, _their_ child in the scientists' hands. He also can't stop thinking about it. His Boss has a plan, he knows, or maybe she really thinks that any kind of promise the scientists gave her is going to stick. 

This is when Tristan wishes most that he could speak or just write better; he's a terrible translator for all the dead who are urging caution, even if his own experiences here, as a being not able to enter into a binding contract at all, weren't relevant to the discussion. She walked in here as an American, if a woman, and has certain expectations that a cat can't take for granted. To her credit, she's spent a lifetime enforcing those expectations on the world; maybe it will work out after all.

She gets more beautiful and terrifying, both in her own right and from the weight of their future that she carries. Tristan has always had an occasional sense of the future; it's usually troubling when it happens and never as clear and straightforward as talking to the spirits of the dead, but here at the juncture of their destinies, he can feel a third one taking form. It's a healthy kitten-boy growing in there, one who survives his birth, and he's doomed to suffer like his father, but be as strong as his mother. 

Tristan only tells his Joy parts of that prediction, as well as how their son's hair is definitely going to be more like her pale gold. He's not sure how much she'll believe him--the spirits are _one_ thing--but she nods once, like she's listening to an adviser she herself invited to the mission briefing. Of course, she has a name for the child right away, and of course Tristan agrees she should be the one to decide that. She's already divined her own true name as well as given him his, so he'd be foolish to interfere in her obvious area of expertise.

~(=^‥^)

His Joy gets bigger as the life inside her kindles. Tristan has never had a special affinity with the living, but he thinks he can feel the baby as he crosses this space between nothingness and life, his unformed but vigorous mind kicking out like his strong little legs, barely able to wait to take on the world.

Tristan worries about his son's future like any good father, and he even has moments where he loses his faith in his Boss' vision. By herself, she is a force of nature, but by choosing him as her partner, she's stepped into the system that's trapped Tristan since before his own life began. He can tamp down those misgivings by focusing on specifics, though, and she also enjoys making practical plans. She's still certain that the scientists will eventually sign Tristan--the mute, useless, pacifist Subject 0051--over to her supervision with enough convincing, but she's a practical woman and doesn't completely rule out a use for plastic explosives.

She knows a lot of people with airplanes, and as a human and a soldier and a wonder, she of course can drive a car. Tristan has met many dead who can drive, and would let them burrow into his body to drive a getaway car, especially since his Boss would be there to shake them back out of him when the driving was done. He would prefer to be possessed by someone whose death didn't actually involve a vehicle, but he's sympathetic to a dead transport driver among his Boss' spirits whose truck was hit by a rocket, and ends up agreeing that you can't really do much about that from the driver's seat if they're absolutely determined to blow you up.

Tristan has been having a lot of fascinating conversations with the platoon of spirit followers around his Boss, even when she's not right by his side. He likes to think that she'll appreciate his efforts to reach common ground, even if it's not as obvious as the paw-writing. Although a few of her dead appear to have been waiting to unburden their consciences to the sympathetic mews of an ocelot-man before they can finally leave this plane, most of them see her spectral company as their new posting, a stealth ops version of the Wild Hunt, and are determined to serve her past their own end and unto hers.

~(=^‥^)

When the time comes, he isn't by her side. There was a _procedure_ planned, a cold-blooded extraction date already written in ink in the facility's schedule, but as carefully domesticated as Tristan might be, his Boss is a wild-caught specimen. She's only as tame as suits her, and Mother Nature is one up on that.

Nobody thinks to read the half-cat stud in on the emergent birth until long after he's been woken up by panicked spirits who are trapped in looping echos of their own labors, lost children and sisters and wives. Facts are slower than emotions with Tristan's usual informants, so by the time that his keeper Sergei comes to get him, rubbing sleep out of human eyes, Tristan's ears are pricked up and his hair is on end. He's darted up and down the climbing logs a few times, which helped, but is embarrassing to get caught doing. 

"Hey, big guy. I guess you can kinda tell something's up, yeah?" Tristan has never burdened Sergei with a discussion of _Ghosts, FYI I Can Talk To,_ but the cat house is a small place and the air systems are not discrete; sounds and smells carry, which is a plausible enough source to cite. Sergei has also been ready enough to extrapolate any number of cat-based superstitions without question, which makes for an easy understanding. In this instance, they're correct; there are some things a cat just knows, and a man would be silly to ask him why.

"Your lady's OK, and so's the baby. It came up sudden, though, and they had to--to get him out of her, quick as possible. But she's fine! These things always happen in the middle of the night, yeah?" 

Sergei seems on-edge, a strange look in a man who's usually at perfect ease in his place as an overlooked cog. While his minder gets out the usual restraints they need for moving through the hallways, and then some, Tristan centers himself. He finds that his tail is bushed out, lashing back and forth in a rhythm beyond thought, and as much as he's surrounded by the worries of the spirits, in the back of his mind those deep cat instincts are clawing their way forward with a different kind of ancestral drive. He has to keep consciously pulling himself upright as they walk down the hall; if jungle cat spirits came back like humans, they'd be yowling at him now to hug the wall, to stalk and hunch and stay ready to spring.

The spirits are crying around him, and even if he were just a normal half-cat abomination, he'd already be on edge. The infirmary is shared with all the other animal-people projects at this site, not just cats, and approaching it is like wading through an international collection of every kind of fear, pain and musk imaginable, overlaid with phenol and industrial soap. Tristan weeps silently and helplessly, surrounded by his escort; they swap out his everyday minder for larger, sterner men as they reach the infirmary doors.

A matron unwraps a rough blanket to show him the baby, and then a miracle occurs: she lets him touch and then hold him. Tristan rubs the tiny pink head, with its spotted ears still kitten-folded, all over his own wet cheeks in a way that he knows, bone-deep, that he _has_ to. He can't stop himself from purring through his tears, even though there are guns, the real kind, right at his back. As if he could do anything but die for this little one already. Adam in his arms is his own whole being, newborn eyes scrunched shut from the curse of Tristan's heritage but with the perfect pink hands of his Joy in miniature, and the addition of the tiniest claws you could imagine. He's much too young to be able to retract them, but they're still soft from swimming in the womb, and besides, Tristan doesn't think he'd mind even if Adam tore his eye out.

He looks so much like his mother, who is here, _somewhere,_ but can't be in the room with her son, and Tristan knows there's no way he can ask _why_ and get an answer. With the guards on edge, he probably can't say anything by waving his dumb paw-hands and not have himself shot before he finishes, they're so convinced he's going to snap and hurt his boy. Maybe it isn't Adam they're worried for--maybe it's not that they don't understand, but that they understand all too well that he'd throw away all those years of being Fraidy Cat to keep this perfect little monster safe.


	12. then the Cat put out his paddy paw and patted the Baby on the cheek

One of Tristan's repeated Life Lessons has been that you shouldn't hold your breath, but good behavior may be rewarded. He isn't angling for an extra hour in the cat house's pool when he doesn't eat baby Adam, or snap the impossibly delicate neck under that big round head with its tiny spotted ears, but they probably would give him some swim time, if he asked; Adam's well-being seems to be what they were worried about in the first place. After all, this is the _expensive_ kind of baby. Tristan also gives his tiny son up, back into the arms of a paid professional, when they tell him it's time to go. It tears at his heart and he weeps silent tears again despite himself, but the techs with rifles seem relieved and he's taken back to his own cage by a single, much less tense escort.

This patent-pending Fraidy Cat cooperation, and maybe a little bit of pity, leads to him being brought back again the next morning, and the next. There aren't any basic survival needs Tristan can give his son that one of the qualified staff couldn't, wearing rubber gloves on their real human hands. But little Adam is healthy and sound and not dependent on any medical equipment more advanced than a diaper with a tail hole, and when his cat-man father holds the tiny pink thing against his furry chest, their purrs harmonize. 

An extra set of not-quite hands is appreciated in the infirmary, even if the matrons are already at loose ends as they await the promised deluge of animal babies. These robust human females are there voluntarily, and not in the same way as the "volunteers" in the dormitory next to his Boss' room, but in the sense that they punch their timecards and go home each day after they've put in their assigned amount of hours overseeing Tristan's cuddles, helping with the fiddly parts of a diaper, and withstanding being flirted with by Sergei. They're also receiving steady checks for the trouble.

Some are duly impressed, at first, by the awesome sight of a fully-grown ocelot-man close up, eyes and teeth and tail, and the implied prowess of the tech who has him so carefully in hand. Some are impressed later, when Sergei shouts over to ask if Fraidy Cat is ready to take a break, and Tristan puts one fuzzy finger up and shushes him. The baby is almost asleep, leaving adorably miniature claw marks as he kneads Tristan with his little human hands improved by inhuman weapons, and one of the matrons walks fearlessly over with a gauze 4x4 to dab the tiny beads of blood away from Tristan's chest before Adam can lick any more of them off.

During this time, Tristan makes such inquiries as he can, given his abilities and disabilities, and learns his Joy been relocated, after the sudden and surgical birth of her son, to a hospital off-site. A real hospital, the kind with an entire ward set aside to keep human mothers alive. The kind of hospital that's subject to independent review of their patient outcomes, too. For all she's settled on a third-string science experiment for a boyfriend, Tristan's Boss is a person of note, someone who can't just be helped to disappear. Not like Tristan, who has two friends in the whole living world, or like Adam, who is so, so small.

Hybrid 00 gets some less hands-on attention, as well. There are higher-ups and sponsors whose official trips make detours to this lab site, and the deputy director walks down from his office while Tristan is holding a bottle for Adam. His ears are fully unfolded now and his eyes are open, even if everything around him is probably still a fuzzy blur. All the better that he can know that he's safe in warm and fuzzy arms, for as many hours as they'll let his father stay with him.

"They tell me you're very gentle with him," Dr. E says in a hesitant voice, almost like it's a surprise. "You have every right to be proud of Hybrid 00. Genetically speaking. You understand that he's your son, 51? That you helped to make him?"

Tristan's entirely unnecessary chains rattle when he looks up, and the noise makes Adam's little tail uncurl while his ears twitch. With both paw-hands full of baby and bottle, Tristan can't sign, but he gives a slow nod and manages an expression of incredulity that works well enough to get the point across.

Dr. E coughs and adjusts his glasses. "R-right. Yes, of course." All those years ago, Dr. E was the one who taught Tristan everything he has of expressive language that isn't ocelot noises, and Tristan is the one who sat next to the nice junior scientist and Paid Attention, no matter how rowdy the other animal-children got or how delicious the birds looked, singing on the branches outside the window. Still, Tristan knows how much easier it is for people to account for him when they can think of him as more animal than person. There's no reason to fight that for the old, failed experiment, but Adam is his priority now.

With claw-mittens like Tristan has, fingerspelling has always been a weak point. He sets down the bottle, kisses the usual frown off of Adam's forehead and then shifts his compact little being to one arm with no more complaints; good, he was about done eating for now, anyway. Tristan dips one of those big, fuzzy fingers in his mildly contraband cup of coffee, then writes out A-D-A-M in careful block capitals, right on the countertop for the world to see. It takes four dips to carry over enough percolated ink, writing it thick and legible as it beads up on the Formica, but Tristan remembers the long-gone shade of Oleg's mother and wants to be absolutely clear about this. 

This is the name his Joy had given their son, long before she ever saw him. _Did_ she even get to see him? Tristan still feels his fear, the one he had long before they called him Fraidy Cat, and how it kept Subject 73 with his claws and his scales from ever finding out he was born of a human mother who gave him a human name. He's ashamed of that, but he uses that shame and the duty he feels to his Boss and his son to speak up, for once.

"Well, that's--that's a little presumptuous, wouldn't you think?" Tristan notes that despite the objection, Dr. E is writing on his clipboard, avoiding eye contact as his glasses slide down his nose again. The doctor has a son too, Tristan is sure he remembers. 

Spelling of any kind may not be Tristan's forte, but it's very easy for him to sign one-handed to the man who taught him, and convey that _she_ named the baby, and give the right emphasis on how important it is to follow _her_ wishes, even if Tristan is just a simple lab specimen who knows his place. He's so glad to have her (or to have had her, if he listens to the more suspicious spirits), to convey some little piece of her strength like the Moon brings light when the Sun isn't in the sky.

It seems that Dr. E also can't refute the _argumentum ad baculum_ that is "the Boss said so," so Tristan dries his hand and holds a sleepy Adam in both arms again. It's no good to spend all this time showing the techs that you aren't going to bite out your baby's throat, and then just give him coffee, right in front of the project supervisor. Tristan knows he isn't allowed to groom anybody with his tongue, but it's hard to stop a baby from sucking on anything in reach, if you don't want to upset him, and also the baby has claws and fangs.

"You need to be careful who you talk to, from now on. I mean, sign, or--or write. Don't let anyone know too much what you're thinking, 51. Don't let them know _that_ you're thinking, actually. I always wished that--" Dr. E follows his own advice and shuts his mouth, almost by force, as he thinks about what to say instead of continuing to speak. Tristan sympathizes, even though his own problem is almost the opposite.

"The baby's mother has some friends--and that's good for her! But they're making my superiors nervous. The director says it's, well, he says it's not the first time a spinster has gotten attached to her old tomcat, which I don't think is really accurate; you're both a lot younger than that, and definitely Hybrid--Adam, Adam is a big part of that, not that you two don't have some real chemistry together too, I'm certain. Actually, bio-chemistry..."

Tristan isn't sure how effective the deputy director's conversations are when both parties are capable of speech. Adam dozes in his arms, and Tristan learns that being the first Viable Hybrid Subject is important but also puts one's handlers under intense scrutiny, which sounds an awful lot like what it used to be like to be Subject 51. The doctor doesn't come right out and say it, and may not even know about his Boss' plans to begin with, but from Tristan's institutional experience, the life planned for Hybrid 00 sounds like an existence that is going to require multiple co-signatures to even _look_ at a tree.

A free-range childhood of combat training at his mother's knee, with an old tomcat staring at ghosts in the corner of their tent, seems further and further off, and only Tristan's years of trained, benign composure are able to support him, Adam in his arms as his core turns to ice. Dr. E doesn't notice and continues thinking out loud, secure in the presence of a listener who can't interrupt.

~(=^‥^)

Tristan is much, much better at listening to the spirits than seeing the future or interpreting omens, but the visit from the deputy director is a bad sign, with nothing of the supernatural about it. He has an uneasy night's sleep, the kind Tristan has been forcing himself into these days, so he can be awake when the people who let him see his baby think that everyone in the world should be awake. In the humans' morning, he and Sergei make it all the way down the hallway to the infirmary, which radiates an odor of fresh soap and disinfectant, before they're stopped and told no, Hybrid 00 is not available; take Subject 0051 back to its cage.

Tristan walks back on muscle memory, barely feeling Sergei's hand on his shoulder, not just his harness, as his keeper pilots him away from the walls. The dead, the ones who can keep their focus and are disposed to take requests, can't find Adam anywhere in the building. Some of the ones with memory saw his boy being bundled up and taken away, in a truck with troops and matrons alike. They're sure Adam was alive then, and Tristan feels certain that he'd be able to tell if his boy were dead. Maybe that's when he'd wake up with a ghost-baby in his arms and spend the rest of his life rocking him gently until he could join him, the scientists jotting down that Fraidy Cat's little mind had failed him and he'd finally gone from harmless to useless.

He feels a species of that now, lost between worlds as he begs the spirits for clues. Tristan stubs his toe on the table, shuffling through his cage; he doesn't remember eating, but he drinks a few times when a cup appears in his paw. Casting his net wide brings the unquiet dead, the ones also tied to this world by loss. Widows of lost seamen, afraid to let go of hope, orphans starved and the battlefield dead who died thinking only of homes not even their bodies would return to. Tristan doesn't surrender to them, doesn't give himself up as a vessel, but a deep, low yowl echoes from his throat until he finally falls asleep, curled up on the floor in a corner of his cage.

When he wakes again, _she's_ here. If he never understood he was in love before, he does now, the sinking, hollow pain from losing Adam and the buoyant feeling of his Joy at his side tearing his heart in two in his breast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from "The Cat that Walked by Himself"


	13. from nunnery of thy chaste breast and quiet mind/to war and arms I fly

"Tristan, you look like shit," she says, and caught by surprise, he laughs; his Joy has returned. He struggles up from his ball of shameful sadness on the floor as she stands straight and strong. With the mother fully-dressed and standing at attention, most people wouldn't think of how deeply you have to cut to deliver a baby the hard way. Most people also don't have a medium-sized wildcat's sense of smell, or Tristan's profound concern for his Boss; there's slow, fresh blood in the air, and the hanging traces of cordite and rustproofing petrochemicals, and then her usual cigars.

He explains with paw-signs that he will raise himself to sit on the bed if she will lower herself to do the same, and with that hint of a smile that signifies her fondest indulgence, she does. Her wound is fresh but doesn't have that sour rot smell Tristan knows to dread; she watches him carefully touch the edges of her torso, then opens her shirt for him in acknowledgment of his deep concern and his fumbling paws.

Tristan is not an obstetrician, but he doesn't feel the need to find one among the dead to confirm that that's a much longer and more erratic incision than usual. No matter how much little Adam was wiggling and kicking in her womb, there was no reason for them to cut her all the way up to the chest, like their boy would crawl away to hide inside his mother just that much longer.

"I wanted to be awake for it. They didn't agree," she explains, and shows Tristan the part of her C-section that actually started out as a different kind of knife wound, also healing nicely. She's in grim good spirits; they're keeping her from her family but in doing so they've shown their hand, and she can finally treat them as the enemy instead of all this cautious political crap.

"I didn't even get to see him," she finishes, and pulls half a cigar from her pocket to light up again. There's the faint smell of milk on her undershirt, like and not like the bottles Tristan was feeding little Adam, and it melds with the smell of tobacco and industrial laundry and _her_ as he nuzzles into her. Her eyes are dry and she's trying to smother the milk out of herself like she would any other weakness. Only one of Adam's parents is a soldier, but his Boss doesn't judge Tristan for leaving tears on her shoulder as he explains how small and how perfect their son is, how he's blond and has real fingers and he frowns so _seriously,_ just like his mother, and also how absolutely certain Tristan is that he's still alive.

He knows that his Joy can't stay this time, and he's not surprised when she says she can't take him with her, although Tristan can tell she was worried he wouldn't agree. She's been offered another mission already. Although she isn't stupid enough to think that obedience is all it takes to win her son and her husband, there's a disconnect between her command, whom she's spent years fighting to be seen as a soldier, and the project, who see her as a successful uterus with a few inconvenient opinions. At the moment, they both think she's almost done having one of those moods that women have a weakness for, and has come to her senses and is ready to be reasonable again, just like she's spent her whole career doing.

Of course, she's tempted to blow a hole in the wall and take Tristan with her now, and she's very clear in her musing that this hole-blowing is not at all a metaphor. It's so unfairly easy to hide a baby, though, and even easier if it's dead. With a full-sized ocelot-man at large, along with the child's mother and all of her strange and heavily-armed friends, the project directors would have cause to escalate from abduction to the unthinkable. With the memory of Adam still heavy in his arms, Tristan agrees that nothing can be worth that risk.

A valuable operative, her command has assured her, can expect to be allowed to visit the child when she returns, to borrow Hybrid 00 now and then from the arms of the more suitable females who are raising him. When this little blip of uncharacteristic sentiment is demonstrably behind her, the scientists in the project are planning to give his Boss the coordinates--to give the lovesick woman _directions_ to her baby's location.

Thus the left hand has shown that it hasn't read the dossier that the right hand has given it, and Tristan's heart swells with pride when she confirms that a solo infiltration job, far off in the United States, is an excellent time for her to get quietly in touch with some people who owe her favors, and with a few who have pledged her their loyalty. After that is when blowing holes in the sides of uncooperative buildings becomes less hypothetical again.

"I'm coming back, Tristan," she says, eyes red without one single tear. "I'll carry out my mission, and then I'm coming back for Adam. They can argue about who _owns_ him, but I don't intend to argue any more." With one warm hand, she dries his cheeks, then pulls him close, forehead to forehead. "And once he's safe, I'm coming back for you."

~(=^‥^)

He misses her as soon as she leaves, and Tristan tries his best not to commit to this hope that she's raised in him. Freak that he is, he knows he can never live in the human world with ocelot ears and a tail, even less so as a fugitive from a black site laboratory, but his Joy has no special love for city life and minds that not at all.

Back when Adam was a knowing gleam in her eye and a slight convexity in her abdomen, Tristan had seen something else that was hopeful. He'd chirruped to get his Boss' attention from the intelligence report she'd been reading as he curled up around her, then showed her the beautiful pictures he had found in one of the magazines that she'd brought him. The colors were deep and saturated, a travelogue of the tropical forest where jaguars and ocelots were, and the human people who lived there too, in South America with their backs to the jungle. Their villages were cozy, wood surrounded by the woods and bounded by open sky. They had an appreciation of their local wildcats, and seemed accepting of the idea of half-man, half-cats, even if only in folklore and ancient artwork, _[see detail on foldout]_. 

Tristan still doubts that the indigenous people in their cat masks and jewel-colored feathers were doing anything like waltzing, but that was the dance his Joy could teach him, and with her strong arms around him, he could hardly complain. She'd been in that area a few times, she said, and although she'd spent more time trapping the local fauna than absorbing the local culture, Tristan hung on her every word about both. Some of the houses even had picket fences, and she had laughed; they were unpainted and very much to keep chickens away from those local wildcats, but that was still closer than his Joy had ever assumed she would come to domesticity.

He thinks about a life like that in the idle moments that are most of his schedule, without the visits to Adam he'd already grown used to. The spirits have a lot of advice about homesteading and housekeeping and are happy to talk about the routines of a lifetime, even if there's some gentle teasing about which of them wears the pants in Tristan's relationship. That's all right; he's used to it. If, when, _if_ she takes him away from all of this, maybe he won't have to wear pants at all.

~(=^‥^)

Nothing good can last, and that includes a halfway hope. There are still the empty slots in the cat house's schedule that Tristan's minder is good at exploiting, finding time for his second-chance cat to swim in chlorine and dream of fish, or sharpen his claws on one of the real trees in the part of Outside that's safely fenced off. They're in the latter place when Sergei approaches Tristan, arms crossed and doing his utmost to look like the bored warden he's expected to be, watching Tristan watch a moth that, for the moment, is slightly more entertaining than it might be tasty.

"There's something going on I have to tell you about, but the problem, here, is that you're part of the problem," Sergei starts, and that's chilling enough for Tristan have to put in effort not to flatten his ears and hunch. He bats at the moth in a way he hopes reads as nonchalant, and uses that forward motion to dive forward and lean halfway over a branch, all ears.

"So you know your big scary girlfriend, yeah? It turns out she's a pretty big deal, and I guess she's still stuck on you, not to mention there's the kid, now. Don't get me wrong; you're a nice enough guy, Fraidy Cat, but that lady _really_ likes you. So how that ends up is they want her to stop making problems and go away, and they figure it'd help with that if you went away, first."

Sergei sighs and shakes his head, and as accustomed as Tristan is to impersonal cruelty and bureaucratic waste, he's never been right at the crossroads of both like this before. He doesn't have to do any extra work on emoting his fear and concern for it to get picked up by his conversational partner.

"Yeah, go away like _that,_ but the one good thing is, it's Dr. E who told me about it, and the very next thing he said was how he thinks it's bullshit, too. So there's another plan now, big guy, only I think you ought to know about it, since you're the one in it."

Tristan nods gravely and settles in on his tree branch for Sergei's nervous briefing. The shadowy figures whom his Boss has been planning to grudgingly heed, or maybe the ones in the next office over, have decided that for simplicity's sake she really only needs one attachment point for her leash. Since Hybrid 00 shows such _potential,_ and there's enough of Subject 0051's only useful attribute in the freezer already, the spreadsheet balances itself.

Although the love of a good woman has doomed him, his good behavior has paid off after all; Tristan already understood Sergei's feelings for Fraidy Cat, but even Dr. E and the local board can't bear putting Subject 0051 down, clumsy paws and ocelot voicebox and pacifist tendencies and all. 

"...So they don't want you dead, _officially._ Well, they want you dead officially, but not like they're going to send an official order that gets written in the logbook, yeah? Dr. E says they've been pushing him to make you have an 'accident,' so you'll be out of the equation but it won't be anyone's fault, especially when she gets back and she's _pissed."_ Sergei has worked here long enough to know, and for Tristan to know he knows, that the handler is even more disposable than the cat he babysits; a murder scheduled on his shift is a step away from suicide.

"We're supposed to kill you, but make it look like it was an accident. The good thing about that is it makes it easier to _not_ kill you, but make it look like it was an fake accident. An accident where you died, yeah? And then when she gets back, Dr. E can tell her where we hid you, but face-to-face where there's no records. Knowing him, he'll probably get to the point right about when she's holding his neck to the wall. I know she likes you and you like her back, Fraidy Cat, but you have to admit that your lady is really, uh. Strong."

A natural conspirator who's discovered the soft spot of his supervisor's heart, Sergei assures Tristan that he's already secured a promise that the post-event investigation will be conducted by Dr. E personally and result in a mild citation on his employee record. Although there is nobody like Fraidy Cat, there are some openings for a keeper with one of the other subjects who at least doesn't bite. Much.

By this point, Tristan has been signing _thank you_ almost continuously, and even Sergei's eyes are watering from what must be something in bloom. They're at a far point of the fenced-off Outside and nearly out of the cat house's line of sight; if Sergei were going to put Tristan down the simple way, with a bullet, this would be a good place for it. It's also a good place for a purring hug, without adding another disciplinary note to a personnel file that's about to take a hard hit, all for Tristan's sake. Hope is still alive, and a happy ending seems even more likely, now that it's clear that the way to get there is going to be painful and messy for everyone.

~(=^‥^)

That night, Tristan wakes in a cold sweat with howling in his ears, instantly aware that his Joy is dead. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from ["To Lucasta, Going to the Wars"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44658/to-lucasta-going-to-the-wars) which my conspirator Not_You confirms as basically joy_boss.txt


	14. my intents are savage-wild/ more fierce and more inexorable far/than empty tigers or the roaring sea

He's seen and felt dying, as it turns into death, before. Not all of his conversations have been talking to the spirits who are left to wander, or loiter, after it's all over. Sometimes Tristan has been there on the spot, or at least in the building, as the people or half-people that he'd known in life moved on that one step ahead.

It's a transition everyone will eventually have to make, but some people do so with anticipation or acceptance, and some still meet it with surprise. There are situational considerations to that, as the spirit of a military driver who was hit by a rocket has argued with Tristan. It isn't much of an argument between them; he has to agree that months being poisoned by dying kidneys is a different affair than hearing a strange whistling sound, but there's no arguing that there are still people who meet a slow death with the same surprise as a bomb. The normal humans who have died in Tristan's vicinity have usually been surprised, by the rage of an experimental subject off the leash or by how literally their supervisor enacted their firing. The dying among the animal-people usually languish, but some of those have been blessed by a real animal's understanding of death, which is not to know about it until it's already there.

Tristan has only ever had two living friends; his Joy is the first person who's loved him, and she loves with as much commitment as she gives to anything else she chooses to do. She's an ocean away from him now, on the mission that will buy her the slack she needs to rescue their stolen child and Tristan himself, who can only wait for her with the constancy of the lady in the tower. He knows that he can behave himself and that he can be patient--after all, he's spent his whole life doing both. Waiting for his Joy and their baby is different from the waiting he was doing before. That was waiting for something he had never known at all. This should be easier, except now he knows what he's missing.

Still, he can wait. She said she planned to muster her reinforcements and return for Adam and then him, and while he knows her understanding of strategy is unparalleled, Tristan would be the first to agree that his Boss is a woman of action and not shy of open warfare. He reminds himself that it'll be sooner, rather than later, that he'll see her again.

Tristan has never been less happy to be right.

It's the middle of the night, even for half-cat abominations, and he comes to himself confused and sweating and grasping at consciousness, like a sleeper after a sonic boom who can't remember the noise that woke them up, only that their heart is pounding in the aftermath. There are spirits howling around him, some of them his local companions and some the legion of the dead that follows his Boss with the same devotion he does. They're running to battle stations they remember from previous lives, sounding alarms that only ring in Tristan's head; there's a hole in the center of their existence and their world is heaving and taking on water.

His world too, now that he's awake to this horrible understanding. It isn't a feeling of her being gone; she's here, maybe more _here_ than ever, even though he knows that she was just overseas. It's hard to be near someone so alive when so much of your experience is with the other kind of person, but now that energy that boiled off of her, that was in her living body so far away from him, surrounds Tristan with the warmth of a hug that he'll never feel again.

"Joy, what _happened?"_ he blurts out into the dark of his cage, before he can recover enough to say anything more befitting a lifelong spirit medium.

"What are you doing here, Tristan? Did the bastards kill you? Am _I_ dead?" she asks herself as much as him, with speech and focus coalescing her into her own majestic self again. First things first: she slowly curls her hand into a fist as if to test that the first tool of her trade still works. That established, she picks up her usual matter-of-fact tone. "I guess you really _can_ talk to ghosts. That guard with the carbine shouldn't have been in range at all. I suppose I can thank the butchers at the lab for making a mince of my gut beforehand. I was still a quart low when I left."

"I'm so, so sorry," he says, lamely, and reaches for her with his living arms. In this space where his dumb cat tongue is no barrier, all he can think to say is to tell her how much he loves her, how little he deserves her, and how he can never blame her for taking on every battle that he was too weak to fight.

"...Your voice is beautiful, Tristan," she says after a moment, and he can feel something else: she's _going_. Tristan knows there's a place beyond the kind of death that's still attached to this world; he's felt spirits drift off to there when they were finally ready to leave, and he knows that some people don't hang around to talk to him but keep moving on, no delays. This is the first time he's felt a selfish urge to tell someone no, to ask his Joy to stay, to be one of the voices in his head until he can finally follow her too.

It knots up his stomach and turns his blood to ice, but Tristan doesn't make the impossible demand. If she's leaving so quickly, from the living world where her troops and her only son and the cat-man who loves her are staying, it's some strong, inexorable force that compels her. She's being called away to take a place with her spirit legion at the head of some eternal army in Valhalla, or maybe simply as herself, so strong and resolute and self-contained, she's qualified for whatever next step there is beyond human. Or semi-human.

As much as he loves Adam, too, he can't love his Boss and keep her from her duty. 

"I have to go--there's somewhere else I need to _be._ I can feel it, but I can't explain it. All of this is your area, not mine," she says, as close to wavering as he's ever seen her. "I know I can't ask you to wait for me--but I know you will, anyway."

Silly old cat; he's crying again, and even his spirit-voice babbles. "I know Adam is alive; I don't know where he is or how he is, but I'd know if he were dead. That's all I can do, Joy; I can't save him like you could."

"I wanted better for my boy, and for you; I want to burn them to the ground for what they've done." She looks him in the eyes as she puts one callused hand on his cheek. It's already starting to feel immaterial again, but her will is enough to hold Tristan wherever she wants him. "We love him; that's still more than either of us got. Adam will have to be strong, like his father."

The final word as ever, she relents and lets herself be pulled away. Her spirit legion are spiraling behind her into the hole in the world that her leaving tore, and the local dead are following helplessly down in the maelstrom. It's quieter than it ever, ever should be now. Completely alone in his concrete cell, with no one, dead or living, to see or hear him, Tristan does the weak and shameful thing and goes away for a while, too.

~(=^‥^)

Tristan comes back to himself aching, itching and unable to move. He's surrounded by the antiseptic odor of the infirmary again, with no traces left of little Adam. Waking up a little more, he discovers he's cotton-mouthed thirsty, too, and definitely shaking off a chemical sleep, the kind that stays wrapped around him as his eyes open. It's not the kind where a drug gently helps him stop caring, just one of the ones that makes everything slow and not-worth-it, like swimming through syrup with sand at the bottom.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and an empty mind attached to a somewhat-human body is tempting real estate for the things that are tired of being without physical form. Some of the local spirits managed to stay their ground during the rupture made by his Boss' death, then more came wandering slowly in from further afield, some to naturally fill that emptiness and a few who were eager to capitalize on the availability of an unguarded spirit medium, now, while lines were short.

He's always been afraid of his rage, the sullen jungle cat crouched deep within him that takes each daily insult to heart, and yowls out to the angry spirits who are so eager to encourage anger into action. This is new, though; Tristan has never been brought low by grief before. He's never had so much hope and good fortune that it could set him up for this pain when it was taken away.

But of course there are the dead in grief out there, just like the dead in rage, and while he was absent, it's obvious what kind of spirits took possession. Tristan's body is torn wherever claws could reach, with points of pain and tension where human sutures are holding semi-human flesh together, and where snags of gauze are tugging at the loose ends of stitches and damaged flesh alike. Over that physical injury, he recognizes the unmistakable feeling of hard restraints.

Those murderous paws are buckled into the stained canvas mittens that Tristan knows all about, and has been so foolishly proud that the scientists knew-- _decided_ he didn't require them. He's always sat still, a Good Boy, while they shine lights in his eyes and ears, prod at the gums around his fangs, or shove their most exotic implements down his throat and into any other places they choose. That's their right as the owners of his body and his duty as a subject, and he always tolerates it with as much of a smile as he can, even when the pain brings tears to his eyes.

Tristan has been nothing but cooperative and understanding about not having bodily autonomy, which brings him to where he is today. He moans a little, deep in his throat with his eyes scrunched closed, as much to test his returned control as it is to express to an uncaring world how dissatisfied he currently is with existence. That's when there's suddenly the cold metal lip of a cup pressed to his mouth.

"Hey; hey, big guy. You back with us now? Let me know you're awake, and there's water." It's Sergei, again or still, and Tristan opens his eyes and nods a little, the motion abbreviated by a high collar around his neck. Cool water is tipped into his mouth, carefully but still too quickly; he swallows to keep from choking and abstractly observes his dry throat try to decide how to deal with the influx.

"I shouldn't have told you about the plan, huh? Shit, Fraidy Cat, you scared the hell out of me. I'm all right--didn't even need stitches, just some wrap and another tetanus shot. I forget you have those fangs, sometimes." Sergei holds up a bandaged arm in Tristan's eyeline, flexing it to demonstrate ease of movement. The dressing makes it hard to tell, but it's about where an arm would get bitten, trying to immobilize someone with sharp, pointy teeth.

"You were yowling so loud the whole cat house heard it, but Dr. E says that's actually pretty good, other than you going nuts and clawing yourself up in the first place. Since we're supposed to kill you for the higher-ups, and _'killed himself for personal reasons'_ is about their favorite cause of death anyway, it'll look like we're complete idiots but, hey, we did what they told us. Plus, your lady friend will never believe it, also on account of it being the usual lie, so maybe she won't get too upset on the way here."

Sergei sighs, and pulls his lab coat back on, not noticing the pangs of memory across his ward's face. Tristan wants to explain himself, to bring up the single deep and terrible piece that's missing in that plan, but his hands are tied. Literally. He was made as a weapon, and even a rifle with a cracked barrel must be secured, to prevent damage to its owners.

"You're not... what you did. Was that just so this looked good? I mean, we got photos of it, and they're gonna help the file, but--were you worried about _me?_ I'm gonna be fine, big guy; don't worry. Dr. E says he found a project further east where they're building some kind of walking tank; something stupid for the Army to throw money at. No use for my excellent animal training skills there," he cocks his head; they both know who's done the most to make this partnership work, "but the other thing on my qualifications is that I'm real good at keeping my mouth shut, so that and janitorial gets me right in. Don't have to lock a tank up in a cage, at least."

"Goddamn, Fraidy Cat, I wish it wasn't like this all the time. You'll like it out there, I promise, and then with your girl and the baby coming next..." Sergei pauses again, glancing at the dirty grey skylight that passes for a window, then reaches in to unbuckle the leather brace holding Tristan's head upright.

"You know when you get out there, yeah, there are gonna be _so many trees."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and, honestly, plot twist, is from _Romeo and Juliet._ I don't think that's a spoiler because I already used the "Everybody Lives" tag up top.
> 
> Use of tetanus toxoid is period-appropriate, with certain assumptions, and that's _before_ you start to consider the flexibility of the canonical science timeline in _Metal Gear_. 
> 
> (I realize it's unlikely anyone much minds whether tetanus toxoid is anachronistic, but sudden bursts of plot-unrelated research are a big hitch in my ~creative process~, apparently, so I'd like to commemorate at least one of them.)


	15. some want to follow things that move, to watch and slink and wait and spring; to kill and bite, bite deep and rich, sucking the blood

Being dead, but only on paper, is a little like being dead as far as Tristan understood it before. Nobody can see him--well, to be clear, nobody _may_ see him, and he is forced to go to a different yet familiar place, although for now it's just an unused officer's suite in the dormitories. There's a bed and a shower and no bolted-together pieces of wood whatsoever to climb on, although he could reach the unsecured window without anything to boost him up. Even the table is a tiny thing that rests on bent metal tubing and probably couldn't hold his middling man-cat weight; overall, this human palace might be smaller than his cage ever was.

Not that Tristan is ready to do much climbing. For a time that feels like days, he drowses in an aching heap on the government-issue bed, being shaken awake at intervals to swallow pills and eat bland, meaty stew. It's only Sergei here nursing him, and despite his fogginess, Tristan notices that there's an extra tablet for him to take when the window is dark, right about the time that a human might be thinking about bedtime. That's completely understandable; they don't have anywhere near the manpower to have someone sit up all night, making sure Fraidy Cat doesn't suffer another attack of _feelings_ and neck himself with the curtain cord after all their hard work. Half-asleep and slightly hung over one morning, he listens to a visit from the deputy director before cautiously opening his eyes.

"Uh, no, Doctor, I don't think so. I already asked, because I figured you'd want to know, yeah, and he says he's sorry. The way he tells it, sir, it was night and he was sad, very very sad about the baby, sad about the woman, sad about going away from the baby. He loves the baby and the baby is small--very small, he wanted me to know that _especially_ the baby's face is small... You know how he is, Doctor, and it's harder with the mittens on. Anyway, he says he's sorry and he's going to be good."

In the end, it's determined that they don't have anything at all like a cat-person psychiatrist on staff, let alone one they can read into their conspiracy, and that Tristan does seem sincere enough to go without restraints. Dr. E explains the plan to him again in his circular fashion, but more gently, with pauses to ask if Tristan understands that some things are pretend. It might be the closest he's ever seen the senior scientist get to tact, being so careful not to upset all of his kitty-cat emotions. There's still a digression about a lab partner who secretly kept a puppy, in a dorm room much like this one, during Dr. E's undergrad years. (The deputy director has every faith in Tristan to be much better than the mutt was at staying quiet when people are walking past in the hallway.)

Nearly all of the stitches have been removed when Sergei shows Tristan his file, with a line through the typed label and "deceased" lettered on in red ink. The black-and-white pictures are starkly convincing, even if his body was only so pale and still from blood loss and the tranquilizers. Seeing objectively what the dead, left unsupervised in his body, did to his flesh is a perspective Tristan didn't anticipate, and he only realizes he's shivering when he feels Sergei's arm across his shoulders.

"Those ones with no face, and the gut all cut open? Those aren't you, big guy. We thawed out 0017 and--yeah, I know, right away I _told_ Dr. E that poor old 17 was a jaguar. He doesn't think anyone will notice. I guess it really would be a first if they did, yeah?"

Tristan has to admit they have a point. Nobody at the cat house has tattoos or brands or stock tags to confirm their identity (or to let a runaway subject lead a busybody back to the facility). It's easy enough to give a verbal description when it starts with "173 cm female, Semitic features" but ends up in "black-tufted caracal ears." 17's spirit is no longer around for Tristan to apologize to, but he has to think that the jaguar-man would be glad that his years-dead corpse, with the bullets carefully picked out, was helping someone else to escape, too. It's a very convenient conclusion to come to, since the deputy director has already forged the appropriate paperwork and overseen Sergei moving morgue drawers, but Tristan has a life of interviewing the spirits of the departed to draw a consensus from. 

_She_ would have been proud to serve one last time, even as a simple distraction, but Tristan knows he can't risk dwelling on his lost Joy, not now. She'd gone away so quickly, to the place beyond that awaits people of her caliber. The place he can't go, not yet. If he let go, and let the spirits take his body, he'd give up any chance at all at vengeance for her or rescue for little Adam, and if he gave in so easily, what hope would Tristan have of following his Boss to her deserved reward?

That's dwelling on it, again. Tristan brings his eyes back into focusing on the dormitory room around him, and is careful to smile, as best he can, at Sergei. His keeper never used to worry about the little cat-trances Tristan is prone to, staring into an empty corner or the ceiling, but everyone's frazzled right now. There's a cargo plane landing soon, Tristan knows, and a crate of biological specimens due to be lost in the shuffle of refueling, in a place half a world away.

~(=^‥^)

He gets seen off with no more fanfare than an escapee could expect, just a civilian duffel bag with the tags carefully removed, a pat on the shoulder from Dr. E and a look-both-ways-first hug from Sergei before he nails the crate shut behind him.

Not being a clotheshorse, Tristan had easily found space in his carry-on for the handful of children's books that were his Joy's courting gifts, even if his old school readers were too identifiable and had to stay behind. Sergei even came through with one very particular _National Geographic._ The periodicals that made up most of the late Fraidy Cat's estate had filtered into the break room; language barrier aside, the photos were worth perusing. The one with jungle cats and jungle people and all the green, green leaves around them still had excited little claw-holes in the corners of the pages.

"That's about where you're going to," Sergei had told him, handing the dogeared magazine back. "I guess the doc and your lady talked some about, you know, _contingencies_ before she left. He says there's no reaching her while she's on a mission like that, so we just have to be patient."

Penned into the crate, Tristan hopes he can keep his faith in his impossible hopes for his son, the same way his keeper, a seasoned pragmatist, has started quietly believing in the power of love. Even with full use of his paws returned to him, Tristan still hasn't explained to Dr. E and Sergei that his Boss isn't coming back. He'd have to start by explaining how he knows it in the first place, and he has a plane to catch.

Tristan has traveled in an airplane before, surprisingly. He wishes he could see out a window when he does it, some time, but animals and science projects fly in boxes strapped down in the cargo hold so they don't get hurt or damage other cargo. On some other plane, in some other place, there might be political refugees who get smuggled out that way too, though, which is a comforting thought. Instead of a view, Tristan has to settle for some spirits from the Great War in silk scarves and goggles and well-worn leathers, telling him how absolutely beautiful it is to be in the open air and how surprised they are to be greeted by one of the living, up this high.

His berth is a narrow wooden darkness that would probably be claustrophobic to someone who wasn't part cat; Tristan finds it cozy, and though he doesn't have anyone he'd like to confess it to, comforting. He has his bag and then some extra provisions for the long trip, as well as a series of canteens and, importantly, a strap wrench to open them. As much care as they've taken in planning his getaway, Tristan is pretty certain which of his co-conspirators was the one who remembered how bad his stupid paw-hands are at using things made for real humans. He smiles in the dark and wonders if he'll see Sergei again. Not alive, obviously, and if it's going to be the _other_ way he sees people, Tristan hopes he doesn't see Sergei any time soon.

Just like his best hopes for baby Adam.

~(=^‥^)

One of the easiest places to hide an extremely classified science facility is in the very middle of nowhere, so most of the shipments coming out of Tristan's former home are being delivered, for further study and experimentation, to a different middle of nowhere. (The bulk of the incoming shipments are completely blatant and above-board, but it's difficult to hide someone in a completely empty cargo bay that until recently held canned meat and toilet paper. Even if that someone is part ocelot and good at scrunching himself down low in the darkness.)

This circuitous route and lack of visibility make it hard for Tristan to keep track of just where in the world he is, The spirits who hang around the holds of a series of freighters are friendly enough, but of international origins to begin with. In the belly of a smaller ship that creaks when it lists side to side, a couple of dead sailors insist on teaching him a song about loving a mermaid but only her top half; they seem to think it's hilarious and are only a little disappointed that their new ship's cat can't yowl along too loudly, for fear of being discovered. 

There's a nap and then another, smaller ship after that. Maybe a boat; Tristan always enjoys talking with the spirits, but so far they've had much more interesting things to talk to him about than the specifics of nautical terminology. Definitely a boat if the violent rocking, the sea spray losing its brine, and the diesel stink of the engine add up to something small enough. Tristan holds on to the wood of his crate with his claws while nausea does a good job of distracting him from the fear of What Happens Next.

As it so often turns out, What Happens Next is a lot more of the same. The waves die down, the boat goes on for a long time, and then it finally stops and Tristan's crate is loaded out. He's pretty sure, from how they're trying to handle the box carefully, that they know something is alive inside, probably something wild. He's also pretty sure there aren't very many of them, from how bad a job they're doing. 

He's set down on solid ground, and someone is prying out the nails that Sergei tapped in, days before. They squeak as they come out one by one--hey, shipping crates are _expensive_ \--and suddenly Tristan's dark-adapted eyes are looking at the greenest green he's ever seen, just like in the magazine but with the leaves rustling gently in a warm breeze that _smells_ like life.

He's also looking at what's probably the captain of the boat, or the head of the small party who were looking for bonus pay. Tristan smiles, big and broad and not even forced; he's just so, so happy to be here. This has the unwanted side effect of showing off his fangs, too, but he hasn't done any leaping or mauling, and the man seems to take it in the friendly, human way it was meant, standing up and out of Tristan's way.

"Well, that's just one more thing we didn't see. Jesus Christ, those people; it's a cat werewolf. Get outta here, cat werewolf." 

There's another man with a shotgun who doesn't aim it more than halfheartedly, and the one with the crowbar just taps a few times on the side of the crate, like a conductor waking a sleeping passenger. They'd clearly planned on releasing a different kind of laboratory specimen into the wild, but at the moment their plan is still tentatively holding up.

Tristan has never liked to cause problems for anyone. Although the ocelot in him is twitching to just leap out into the jungle, one last push off from planed and milled wood before there's nothing but sand and dirt under his paws, he has his carefully-packed luggage to think of. He gives his best Fraidy Cat trill as he tugs the duffel out of the crate behind him, then slings the bag over his shoulder and bounces off, with only slightly less than feral unconcern, to the treeline without one single look back at what he's left behind.

After all, there are trees to climb up, and back down, for as long as he wants to. The foliage is thick and untrimmed, so while there are dead limbs to watch out for--and how interesting that feels, the difference in springiness under his feet--there are also so many heavy branches that reach almost over to the next one in the next tree, like a series of hallways in a human building. Tristan makes quick inroads, deeper in-country and away from the little launch, almost without thinking. There are so many smells here, growth and decay and animals. _Other_ animals, he has to remind himself as he's getting ready to rub the side of his face on a good-looking tree trunk, and that's when he stops and looks back to realize how far he he's gotten from that last outpost of industrial civilization. He's been sent this far by his human friends, but how far he continues is all up to him.

The journey was days long and of course his crate did not make it unsullied, but the very first time he urinates on a tree, Tristan still feels a deep sense of apprehension. There's a war between finally following his long-buried instincts, and between those years of careful second-guessing every impulse, the rewards of which were Good Behavior. He still has to pee, though, and a tree's as good as a bush, but the feeling of making his mark out in the world, of having something that's _his..._

...Or that smells like him, at least; Tristan doesn't want to be hasty. He knows he should find his own territory here, but he's not going to settle down until he's gotten the lay of the land. With his human reason, Tristan wants to find the headwaters of that stream, to see if there's any natural shelter up high in that rock formation, and keep an eye out for animal burrows to remember when his dried meat runs out. With ocelot instincts, there's now a tree in this forest that nobody else had better even _look_ at, and even if Dr. E himself had followed him here and was now Very Disappointed by his behavior, Tristan still wouldn't regret it.

Of course there's nobody there behind him with an electric prod, sparking ozone into the air for effect before they use it to explain to 51 that he's been a dirty boy. Instead, behind him is a spirit in a tunic covered in feathers. Sewing them together so ornately looks like intricate work, so in life he must have been someone important, which makes it all the more neighborly a gesture that he's trying not to laugh at Tristan out loud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from _Island of Dr. Moreau;_ are we not Men? 
> 
> Author is aware that "semitic" is not a currently-valid racial descriptor; this story takes place in *checks writing on hand* the nineteen thirfties.
> 
> I don't think I should tag this for watersports. It seems like it's water _business_ if you're an ocelot, but let me know if you feel weird, I guess. I didn't want to over-tag and get some poor pissfreak's hopes up for nothing.


	16. I love the jungle. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment

The spirits here really are the same as back home--as back at the place where he used to live. Some of them are angry and restless, but some are just idly curious about what the living are up to, or bored and looking for trouble. Some of the dead need to work a few things out before they continue on their journey, and Tristan does his best to help with that. He's no exorcist or afterlife psychiatrist; it's much more tea and sympathy, as well as being sort of a traveling linchpin between worlds as he always has been. 

Having Tristan around as a focus helps a couple of the old grandmothers get a clearer look at the next generations, running and laughing and skinning their knees in the sunshine, and over a few weeks that's what it takes for them to feel at peace enough to drift away into whatever's next. That place where his Joy has gone, or somewhere like it.

The slow progression lets different spirits come to the forefront, finding an audience at last to pass on their lifetimes of forest wisdom and survival expertise. They're tolerant of Tristan's learning curve; those savage ocelot instincts he's always fought against are helpful in this wild place, but he still spent his childhood under incandescent lighting. Tristan learned to walk, paw-pad feet and all, on cement, standing on two legs like a human--at least, he did if he knew what was good for him. Before the old hunters and subsistence farmers can really get into it, a woman who died in childbirth three years ago pulls Tristan aside and tells him gently that eating unripe fruit, or even too much of this perfectly ripe fruit that's just hanging there, arms-reach all around him, is what's giving him the runs. Silly old cat; he thanks her, and she gently suggests that he could keep an eye out for when the real jungle cats are getting too close to the village. Her kids are older now, but there are always younger and more delicious ones to worry about.

There are so many different kinds of trees thriving here, and yes, he's peed on a lot of them, but he gets to rub himself on them too, or scramble up and feel his claws bite into all the different textures of bark. Without constraints on his movement, he can run flat out, as long as he watches for vines, or make a loop through the packed-together branches and end up a mile away. He misses his family and he's gone from two to one to zero living friends, but just being out in Nature does wonders for Tristan's mood. When he explains it like that, the spirit of a towheaded expatriate (who's been teaching him the actual scientific names of these trees) laughs himself into a cloud of shimmering dust for a few minutes. There's a scoutmaster back in Boston who would be happy to hear that his advice worked for _someone._

Like a gentleman, but like a gentleman ocelot, Tristan has settled into marking his territory at subtle and deliberate intervals. The ones who need to know will know, the other predators and the other cats. The "other" cats; Tristan sighs and spends a moment of thanks that there have been no female ocelots roaming closer in hopes of an assignation with a strange-smelling but clearly robust suitor. The first half of Tristan's life had been a long series of miscommunications, and at least out here he hasn't disappointed any of his fellow wildlife. Even the prey animals seem to understand their place in the cycle, and it's a relief to fit in without apology.

The spirits teach him so many lifetimes' worth of knowledge living in and around the forest, but it isn't the most straightforward way to learn a human language, listening to the dead speaking it overlapping with whatever mechanism lets you understand them anyway, along with being able to see them in the first place. Still, Tristan spends a _lot_ of time talking to the spirits, and even more time listening to them and at the edges of the human village, and finds his way into the main two local languages, one of which is Spanish and one of which isn't. 

He could probably call himself fluent, except of course he can't speak them out loud in a way the living would understand. Tristan does think he could write them phonetically, for a very forgiving reader. Ironically, that would already be above the local average literacy, out here where the Church didn't take root and finding your place in the wheel of seasons means more than abstract philosophy and someone else's history. Having written communication ruled out is a bit of a relief; he likes his neighbors from afar, and doesn't want to burden them with the absolute certainty of his presence.

Tristan's made out of a native cat and, as far as he can tell, an inexpensive strain of Slav, but luckily the locals were already expecting their supernatural entities to be pale-skinned. He feels a little bad about misrepresenting himself, even by implication, but he's not here as the vanguard of any imperial power, and the dead reassure Tristan that he is doing a bang-up job of fitting into the local mythology. The spirit of an ancient priest robed all in white grumbles that Tristan really could be appropriating chickens from the village until they learn to offer them as tribute, but he admits that that's optional and ultimately up to Tristan's discretion, him being the one who's the _nagual_ and all. He's been glimpsed briefly, in the distance or the dark, and leaves the occasional unexplained paw-foot print, and that's a cat-person's proper niche in the village metaphysics.

Of course, Tristan has spent time off and on, thinking of how to make his way back into civilization. “Civilization” is a loaded word; it isn't that he prefers steel and concrete to his current environment, and really, his human neighbors on the edge of the woods seem to have the right idea about a lot of things. When Tristan first understood about the culture of the siesta, he knew that he had finally found himself among reasonable people.

A big city means travel, though: big trucks and boats and railroads leading to even bigger cities, and from there further and further east, where he last saw his son. The people who own Adam, like they used to own Tristan, know how to use all of that industry to their advantage. They have money and its power, and can pick up a telephone and speak mouth-words on it, to warn their comrades a thousand miles away that a grizzled cat-man was seen stalking in their direction, or to call in an airplane that can whisk any given research subject to any corner of the Earth in hours. That's years of paw-travel and hitchhiking away, even if he picks the correct new direction.

Tristan can speak with the dead, but all that means is he has no idea where Adam is, except still alive. In his darker hours, he reaches out for little Adam, hoping not to find him. If the child were dead, Tristan could apologize to him, but alive, blessedly alive, Adam is as lost to him as his Joy is lost, gone away from this life in the other direction. Knowing the arbitrary boundaries of the laboratory, Tristan anticipates and dreads that awful moment when Adam, truly dead but not gone to the place beyond, comes to him like his mother did, standing over Tristan tall and blond and broad and using a perfect human voice to enumerate every grief he suffered before he died alone and too soon.

Tristan's village neighbors are used to people being less than perfectly-formed, but with his telltale ocelot features, he knows too well that heading into the city is as good as returning to captivity. Tristan doesn't even have a voice to work with, and his paw-gestures, although useful in the past, draw attention to the very paws that are a giveaway to what kind of a beast he is. Out of desperation he tries scorching the fur off of his arms in the fire, but gets one paw-hand done before he stops, looking even more like a strange, gnarled freak. One who smells terrible now, too; if Tristan found a mute thing that looked like himself skulking in the cargo hold of his freighter, he'd be worried about contagion, not inclined to give it passage. No matter how dark a pair of sunglasses he stole to hide his final shame. 

So he stays, and waits, and talks to the dead, just like the laboratory except nothing at all like the laboratory. Some of the nights are cold and the days get much too sunny, but he's skulking in the foliage or napping in one of his hideaways for the worst of it, and Tristan has the freedom now to be awake and asleep whenever it makes sense to be, not at the call of a bell and the rattle of the food cart. 

A puddle or the side of a machete are no mirror, but when it falls in front of his eyes, he can tell his hair is making the sideways step to grey, and his paws can feel his hairline slowly creeping up his scalp the way he remembers it doing on some of the scientists. Tristan never could grow a beard, whether by the scientists' design or by chance, but in his advancing age he starts to find honest-to-goodness whiskers bristling out beside his nose. The stiff little things poke out in a niggling way that he can't help rubbing, at first, but when they reach their modest final length he finds he doesn't mind them. He's not sure they do anything to help his movements in the darkness, not really, but using two licked finger-pads to wipe the meat juices off of his whiskers is an enjoyable addition to his grooming routine after meals, so things could be worse.

Tristan doesn't think he's going feral. He has the dead all around him for conversation, and carefully keeps up his hoarded-away human supplies, a tarp and a bucket and his Boss' books, the well-worn clothes and blankets that Sergei sent him with those years ago. There are also the small things that got lost and found again nearby: things that fell off clotheslines, a wooden spoon with a pleasantly chunky handle that floated downriver, a folded picture of the Virgin whose pale face did nothing to win over the locals but whose dotted halftone gaze at her little blond baby makes Tristan feel an aching wrap around his own personal faith. 

Among his new possessions are also his favorite things to wrap himself against the sun or the cold: the striped, homespun ponchos that have become another symbol of the careful coexistence of cat and Man.

He pulled his first poncho off of a man heading to the bottom of the river. Wool as heavy as an anchor with river water, Tristan had hung it on a convenient branch as an afterthought, then taken it for his own--waste not, want not--when nobody came back to reclaim it in the days after. After all, the previous owner's breath had stunk of harsh sugar cane liquor (when he had stopped spitting out water) and while there hadn't been time for planning, Tristan fervently hoped afterward that dragging out someone who was fall-into-the-river-at-midnight drunk in the first place meant that the peculiarities of the local wildcat population would continue to go without credible testimony.

It wasn't much of an act of heroism anyway, if you ask Tristan. He loves to swim, always has, and likes to think he's good at it, which could be an individual human _Tristan_ thing, or yet another ancestral ocelot trait expressing itself. Either way, there are a few good lakes here, and then miles and miles of rivers, all the way to the ocean. There's no more waiting on a schedule to swim like back in the laboratory, where the chlorine burned his nose and there were incidentally not any fish either, not like here where they're all around and you can just keep eating them as you go. Tristan happened to be in the right place at the right time, just like the _ishgunmahuan_ that he let swim out of his claws so he could kick over and fish out an idiot instead.

About a month later, Tristan found an empty bottle fitted over one of the little branches of a tree, near the swollen bank where the man had fallen in. There were a couple of yellow flowers that might have fallen beneath it, with a little round loaf of bread that smelled so good, so nostalgically like human food that Tristan had to spring up into the covering branches of the tree and take an urgent poll of the dead before he disgraced himself. His ethical concerns were noted, but there was a nearly unanimous go-ahead from the spirits of dead locals; Tristan could eat the offerings due a guardian angel without guilt, since it had been his paws that effected the miracle in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title quoted from [Werner Herzog.](https://youtu.be/3xQyQnXrLb0) As much as I'd like to say my life is a David Lynch movie, it's pretty easy to hear Herzog explaining in balanced, careful English how badly I've fucked up at any given point.
> 
> Accidentally reposted chapter 15 as well as the new chapter, but I fixed it.


	17. THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS

Tristan had thought it over and left a nice and clear paw-footprint, claws extended, in very carefully-dampened dirt in front of the bottle-tree where he had found the bread and flowers, in thanks and in proof of receipt, one (1) forest-spirit-cat-monster offering. 

That account settled, he still grew to appreciate the poncho, another human invention that proved that at least there was _one_ group of people in the world who had their priorities straight. It kept him warm when he stopped moving, which only improved the joy of spontaneous naps, was well-ventilated enough to keep his pale shoulders from burning yet not roast him in the sun, and let everything dangle that naturally wanted to dangle while still giving his tail room to lash around freely. Most importantly, if one were happily galumphing through the trees like a spotted idiot, poncho flying in the breeze until it got caught on a branch, the neck was big enough that you didn't get strangled but only suffered an ignominious halt and slide to the ground.

Many days later, Tristan was draped over the fork of a tree in the shade by the water, the poncho draped over him in turn as he napped in the early afternoon that's midnight to a cat-person. Comfortable in his forest and in his skin, he was still cautious enough to wake for human footsteps, and found himself suddenly in the awkward position of wearing the outfit he had stolen while in the presence of its former owner.

It was definitely the same human man Tristan had rescued: he was looking very thoughtfully but not too purposefully around the edge of the river. Of course, Tristan had the home advantage of seeing without being seen, but this was becoming a personal matter, not a matter of species, so he made a spur-of-the-moment decision.

Tristan meowed from his hiding place and made brief eye contact with the human. Once he had his startled attention, Tristan pawed pointedly at his spotted ear and then jumped up into the tree and almost out of view again, except for a few more seconds of lashing his rosetted tail like the Cheshire Cat's smile. That heart-pounding contact was enough and not too much; nobody returned with cash in their pocket and hunters from the city, but later, in the cold season, there was a brand new poncho hung from the bottle-tree. It was just like the Christmas stockings Tristan had heard about in Class, all those years ago when he was Subject 51, except it had nice dark jungle colors and little ocelot-or-jaguar figures woven into the stripes.

Comfortable in the extent of his successful human interaction, Tristan didn't push his luck and go on to appoint himself a full-time guardian _nagual._ Along with continuing to do his best not to be seen by them, he also keeps an eye out for the villagers' interests, but only as much as a good neighbor would. 

Alpacas have no pointy parts whatsoever, not even hooves. What's even more amazing is that they seem to have no natural skepticism, which Tristan notes every time he leads little herds of wool-animals back to pens with broken gates. They're ready to just follow a strange cat-man who might possibly have alfalfa, and the fur on their big bony heads is soft when they placidly let him rub his predator scent _all_ over. The alpacas are very fluffy, and Tristan is certain they're involved in poncho construction; the occasional stray goat is more irascible, being kept for milk or meat and ready to make its humans work for it.

Along with being a midnight shepherd, Tristan also has the surreal experience of bullying off hungry jaguars from livestock with an ease he's sure his scrawny kitten-boy self would never have believed. That's right, jaguar: you thought you were the apex predator, but Tristan is large and strange and his scent is as strong as it is confusing. Begone from this valley and neither eat Grandmother's chickens, nor dip anyone's tail in the tempera paint to make 37 and 72 laugh until the teacher turns his head and tells you all to sit back down.

Coexistence, then, continues, with Tristan mediating between the wildlife and the humans on an informal and nocturnal basis; he doesn't push his luck and show up in the middle of the village plaza for a dance, and they don't dig any overlarge traps, call in any hunters or scientists, or even investigate what entity with limited manual dexterity it was who built a fishing weir out of sticks a respectful distance upstream, leaving strange, elongated pawprints in the mud up and down the banks of the river.

His full-time neighbors are easy to coexist with, but there are still the occasional human visitors from the big cities or other countries to worry about. They don't stay long, coming to take photographs like the ones Tristan saw in his Boss' magazine, to try to talk up a specific philosophy with the villagers, or to stomp into the forest and borrow a few birds or jaguars or, weirdly, jars and jars of beetles. Visits are rare and fine, self-limiting and generally polite; strangers are good for the locals to make trades with, and for the entertainment factor as they eat things or get eaten by things.

Still, each small influx of foreigners upsets the usual balance; for Tristan, a tribe of one, the smartest thing to do is to spend more time on a tour of his farther-off territory and come back later, giving any new humans time to spread their gospel and leave, or time to build their permanent camp and establish predictable habits that he can slink his shadowy way around.

The spirits who prefer to stay fixed in place here are also the ones who are getting more vague about the physical world, so when Tristan returns to the village and the river and greets the quiet dead, he isn't disappointed to only get the basics. This time it's at least five foreigners, but probably one or two more than that. Young and loud, some of them. One woman, nobody's wife. They've stayed to themselves; no mining, no samples, no photographs, a tolerable amount of hunting for food only, and a few pleasantries with the locals. What the spirits find most notable for foreigners is that they've explored carefully enough to find the system of dry caves behind the waterfall, having moved themselves into there and worked on getting very comfortable.

At least they don't sound like scientists, _that kind_ of scientists, or people whom scientists have sent out on a specific mission. Still, it's unusual for outsiders not to have some obvious reason to come here. Sheltering in a hidden cave makes for a perfect secret hideout, and for a moment Tristan wonders if they're a gang of bank robbers in hiding. That makes him smile; if he's being that childish, they might as well be pirates in hiding, or cowboys or cosmonauts or something else romantic. They may be seasoned explorers, but their footsteps in the brush are still city-bred and obvious, so Tristan is able to work his way back in slowly and carefully.

He closes his eyes and lurks in a bush, just inhaling everything that it would be difficult to put into words or explain to someone in a long white coat. There are the expected territorial inroads marked by real, full-blooded jungle cats during his absence, but among them there's a half-familiar smell Tristan keeps worrying at, something faint that's niggling at him and makes him wrinkle his nose and lip to get a deeper sniff. The new arrivals have been shooting guns, but sparingly--probably that prudent subsistence hunting again. 

Their camouflaged boat still smells like diesel and their fires have been set quicker and dirtier than what the locals use to cook, but they've got a latrine that's been expertly dug, olfactorily polite and almost up to half-ocelot standards. The clothesline standing on the outskirts of their camp doesn't tell him much about their bodies, other than they really are city folk, but it could probably stink _worse_ like perfume, Tristan imagines. It's been a long time since he was around consumer products; his old laboratory just had a laundry that seemed to think bleach was next to Godliness, or at least to the workers' paradise.

He has to move upwind of their drying clothing before he sneezes at the unfamiliar chemical odor, and then he's in a sunbeam and starts sneezing anyway, eyes closed and little droplets beading on his whiskers. Tristan wipes his nose with the back of one furry paw and takes a breath of the clearer air. Closer to the strangers, but with their beds and most of their belongings behind a wall of moving water, he's still starting to come to an unsettling suspicion about that maybe-familiar scent. 

It might not be a nervy ocelot or jaguar taking advantage of Tristan's prudent retreat to muscle in on the half-breed's territory. Maybe it's not just cats _and_ people he's smelling, but another cat-person like him. If the lab continued on its merry way playing God, the scientists might still have the occasional soft-hearted moment when one of the specimens outlives its usefulness, just like he did. Maybe they even sent someone made from one of those vials of himself Tristan had to produce--and then it hits him. 

Literally: he's struck by another body that comes in at full leaping speed and staggers him with the impact. Lagging behind in a half-second shift between curiosity and the call to battle, Tristan has a hand gripping either side of his head and it's getting slammed repeatedly into a tree, hitting him almost as forcefully as the realization that this is a male, ocelot-eared version of his Joy's terrifying beauty and the age is _exactly right._

"You look just like your mother," he tries to say, but his spirit-voice fails him for the first time, here at what might be the end, and all he can say to his boy is a cracked meow through his useless cat larynx. That's right, of course: Adam's not among the dead! Adam's alive, tall and strong like he's supposed to be. Hopefully he won't be upset if he figures out who Tristan was, or maybe he already knows, which would be no less than Tristan deserves. Hopefully somebody told him that his mother wanted him to be Adam, and Tristan isn't in the hands of someone who only knows the loveless name of Hybrid 00.

Tristan could never hurt his boy, not on purpose, so the wiles of age aren't as useful as they could be in this fight. All other things equal, no human can hold on to a cat, but this is another of his kind, and Tristan can't bear to wrench his Adam's wrists, can't bite his arms or flail a claw at his pointy little face. His Boss will have to forgive him; Tristan promised her long ago that he'd stop being a gentleman and fight with everything he had. Now it's their son at his throat, the son he failed. Adam is the living testimony to her vigor and determination, the slit-pupiled bearer of his Joy's hard stare, the inescapable judgment Tristan had never wanted directed at him.

Still, there's something deep down that can't just accept defeat. It's that same wildcat tenacity that's kept him alive out here this long, from clawing out the guts of a thousand lizards to keeping himself to himself through the lonely nights. He's getting punch-drunk, but he still yowls and writhes and struggles for escape, if nothing else, and if Adam even realizes that Tristan is holding back, he's too much his mother's son to back down from a fight while he still has an opponent. Adam even smells like he used to, Tristan realizes, in a strange, car-crash flash of clarity. It's stronger, now that he's a man and not a kitten, and there isn't the element of curdled milk and baby powder and... and that gentle yellow shampoo the nurses used on the little spotted ears that Tristan wasn't allowed to lick clean. Those scents were part of the memory of baby Adam, and memory can be so vague when you start to trust it. That had to have been what threw him off for so long; he can hardly see straight now, but he can know that at last he recognizes his son... 

"Tristan!?"

 _Joy?_ he can't even call to her, as her spirit joins in the reunion.

Maybe this is what death looks like from the other side, when you come to your end and you keep moving on. He closes his eyes for a moment and can't feel the other cat-man, _his son_ on him any more; Tristan's sore and throbbing and the claw-wounds sting as his movements pull them, but now her arms are wrapped around him and they're as strong and as soft as they always were. She's crying too, now, which is something she was never allowed to do in life. He's ready for this.

A few paces away there's a serious young human with a pistol half-raised, as well as a very large person who appears to be covered in bees, which is starting to ring another very faint bell for Tristan. His heart is pounding very hard for someone who's dead, and he needs to reevaluate that, just as soon as he finishes rubbing his face on his Joy until she smells right again. Until _he_ smells right; his soul has always been hers, but his body had nearly forgotten its Boss.


	18. yogore neko / sore demo tsuma wa / mochi ni keri

To put it very, very lightly: the Boss is _upset._ At least she's not angry at her cat-man for failing to come to her, but at the system that divided them and the years that they've both lost. Tristan feels it too: he's aware that he's bitter and more so that he's guilty, but he feels too drunk with surprise and love (and a little light head trauma) to rail at the men behind those lost years, or the extremely reasonable assumptions he and his Boss had made, half a world apart and each fully convinced the other one was dead.

They talk it over in one of the surprisingly comfortable rooms in the cave behind the waterfall, chaperoned by a quiet older man--who smells pleasantly like decaying leaves--and his pet bird. The parrot has no way to know anything about Tristan, so he isn't offended by the very clear sense of avian suspicion. How could anything bother him now? _Joy has returned to his life._ She's here beside him after all these years, still as beautiful as she is strong, still very nice to hold and be held by, and best of all, she still wants him, too. 

The most important facts having been established, the rest falls into place: it turns out that it's difficult to distinguish between the heart-shattering psychic awareness of your true love's death vs. your true love _nearly_ dying, and subsequently falling into a coma. The project's deputy director had done a much, much better job of faking Tristan's death on paper than anyone had hoped, and his Joy, reading smuggled documents while she convalesced and looking at inarguable autopsy photographs, had done her stalwart best to focus on the life of little baby Adam instead of the impracticality of a vendetta in the name of a nameless dead man who hadn't even counted as human when he was alive.

"When I came to, I remembered that I'd seen you, Tristan. I knew without a doubt that it was real, but I thought that you were the one who had died, and you had come to me. I still remember hearing your voice..."

Her elderly comrade with the parrot is called the End, and man and bird alike are both gracious enough to excuse themselves when it's obvious there's no bait, no trap, no bad news. Tristan and the Boss are still very much in love with each other, and only barely able to wait until they're alone in the room to put theory into practice.

~(=^‥^)

For such heavily-armed men, with so many unquiet spirits trailing behind them, the Cobra Unit welcome Tristan as one of their freakish own almost immediately.

"Adam made a strong impression," muses the Pain. It turns out he's surrounded by hornets, not bees, and so far the hive has been every bit as polite as the Pain assures Tristan they always are. "We were in each other's back pockets on that boat, so there wasn't a lot of mystery left. I guess having an oce _lot_ around now isn't such a big deal, once you get used to an oce- _little."_

Tristan tries to nod in a way that shows he understands but that also won't encourage the Pain to continue. The Pain claps him on the shoulder with one enormous hand and welcomes him to the crew, then very seriously advises Tristan not to piss on the hornets' nest that his girls are building in a corner of the hallway. 

He knows he can't assume mitten-paw sign language fluency on anyone's part, but apparently the startled look on Tristan's face is enough by itself to make the Pain explain, laughing so hard that the hornets buzz (and some of them sound like they're doing it from somewhere deep in his body). It seems that Adam was not subject to the same years of painful discipline over scent-marking as Tristan had been; maybe they'd found a behaviorist who decreed that too heavy a focus on keeping a cat well-behaved was part of why Subject 0051 had ended up clean and friendly and useless for anything but romance. It's either that, or their son takes after his mother in more than looks, and a scientist commanding little Adam not to pee on things made him all the more determined to yes, pee on _everything,_ no matter what punishment it might bring. 

Both of these possibilities make Tristan's heart swell with inexpressible love for his family, but in these wonderful days, the miracle having come to pass, he can nod a farewell to the Pain and be a jump and four trees away from actually rubbing his face on Adam, who's here and alive and safe and at nobody's mercy. Other than his father's, and after Adam tolerates all the love he can and makes his own leap of escape, Tristan can move on to hold his Joy in both arms and dry his eyes on her strong and benevolent shoulder. She puts up with his sentimentality a lot, these days.

~(=^‥^)

There's no declaration, and certainly no ceremony to prove anything to anybody, but the first week isn't out before the Cobras are unconsciously assigning Tristan and his Joy their titles. "Hello, there, your wife says you may like to see flamethrower," and "Boss, d'you think your husband knows much about the spiders around here?"

The latter question was asked in Tristan's presence, inadvertently. They're seasoned warriors, even the young one, but when they're not locked in a life-or-death struggle, people still forget to look _up._ It's easy to miss someone who'd rather flop across a branch than pull up a chair, especially if his tail isn't hanging down at the moment, and at least the Fear does apologize for any accidental rudeness when Tristan drips out of the tree like a fuzzy raindrop, ready to assist.

As expected, Tristan does know a lot about the local spiders, as well as anything else that can bite or sting. He can tell the Fear is trying very hard not to let his curiosity get the better of his sympathy while Tristan describes with paw-signs how painful the Brazilian Wandering Spider's venom is, once they've finally gotten on the same page about species identification. He starts off especially concerned about making the Fear understand that "Brazilian" is an extremely misleading adjective, but by the end of their discussion, Tristan's beginning to figure out that the Fear takes a local abundance of venomous spiders as a promise, not a threat. 

The Fear does have some helpful containers he made himself, for catching and keeping uncooperative crawling things, so Tristan's shopping list for his midnight forest hunt/patrol/careen grows a few more entries: _Bad Spiders_ and _Fruit (Hornets)._ The latter ought to be something overripe and bruised with sweetness, to continue to prove to his new, smallest neighbors that Tristan can also be trusted to be polite and they need not expect him to cause any trouble that extends in a hornet-direction.

He explains these errands to Adam, who was very quick to drop everything and follow his father on a tour of what Tristan is completely ready to designate the Family Territory. Adam is a little reticent on that, having started to mark out a claim on his own before Tristan returned, but ocelot-to-ocelot, Tristan can see past the obligatory pose of aloofness. There's a lonely boy in there, too, _which is all Tristan's fault,_ but of course he shouldn't start thinking in that direction, both because it isn't constructive and because those are the thoughts that attract the wrong kind of whispering dead.

Besides, Adam is easy to talk to, and understands his father even beyond the training in hand-signs that his own lab gave another assumed-mute subject. However that ocelot simpatico is working, there's a real risk of accidentally burdening his son with more than he needs to know, unlike the conversations with the rest of the Cobra Unit that are still uphill, both ways. Maybe later there will be a chance of things "just slipping out" on Tristan's end, but for now he's still at the stage of spending at least half an hour explaining that he was talking about crabs, not spiders, to the Fury, the gestures being further complicated because one is edible with your mouth and the other is capable of biting you with _its_ mouth. It also develops that some of the other Cobras have no problem with eating either kind of arthropod, which is delightfully cosmopolitan but not helpful to the clarification process.

It's good that they're all so well-suited for each others' peculiarities, since there are an awful lot of them, and good that they're willing to take in yet another stray, but Tristan knows that his own relationship with Adam will take more consideration. He's got that cat-person snobbishness (and Tristan is allowed to say that, being a cat-man himself), that new-guy need to prove himself, and also he's _his beloved son_ and thus deserves all the special treatment Tristan can give him, having so much lost time to make up for. Tristan has had years of outdoor living and contemplation to help reconcile the man with the wildcat and take them both past his stark, institutional upbringing; Adam is a teenage hellcat, surrounded by new people, new things, his loving but long-missing parents, and... something else that Tristan is beginning to notice.

Tristan can barely believe that he's climbing through the branches, warm wind full of the smells of forest life moving around him, with another ocelot-man just like him at his side keeping easy pace. There's another set of eyes that reflect tree frog-green just like his, despite the barely moonlit hour. It's been years for Tristan, but he never forgets that there was a time he didn't have the trees and the sky. Now his son has them, too, and he has family and friends to defend them. In the darkness, Tristan can see more of himself in Adam; all cats are grey at night, and with _her_ hair and _her_ frown hidden, Adam has the shadow of another lithe beast with delicate ears and a long tail. These are the things Tristan is proud to have given him and also the things he's so ashamed to have saddled him with, setting his son forever apart from the rest of the world. At least Adam has the perfect amount of claws to climb and kill, set like sharp little diamonds in hands that are just like the hands any human might use to write a check or load a gun.

Adam also has his mother's take-charge attitude, not prone to getting quiet and maudlin like his father, but he still has a good eye for other peoples' mood, especially when Dad is starting to silently tear up again. Adam breaks the deepening silence to tell Tristan the story of how he got himself sunburnt almost as soon as he was rescued from his lab. Out from under the fluorescents, nobody was forcing him to wear clothing, although even back then it was never so much "forced" as "bribed with cigarettes and cowboy movies, so why not." Adam quickly tells Tristan he's still thinking about that poncho, thanks for the offer, before Tristan can start one more time on his sales pitch, of freedom of movement and suitability for the climate. Tristan smiles and shrugs, not at all insulted; he can appreciate that his son has his own sense of style. Adam is starting to look like he'll make long hair work for him, too; Tristan was perfectly content to sit still while his Boss stood above him with a sharp pair of scissors, making her unilateral decision about his own raggedy locks.

Two cats prowling the roof of the forest in the thin moonlight, they're making their way around the edges of the camp, not officially on watch but still taking the most natural patrol route. This leads to an overlap with tonight's actual first watch; it's Jack, the serious young man who seems like the least unusual of the Cobra Unit, at least when you first meet him. Jack looks like Tristan's Boss just found a lost recruit and forgot to return him to his boot camp for a few years, but Tristan has seen the entourage of dead that follow Jack like a miniature version of his Boss' spirit legion, the collection of people proud to have died with him or angry to have died by his hand, or vice versa, or a mixture of both.

Tristan also has it on the authority of both his Boss and the Fury that Jack can, and usually does, eat anything. Tristan knows some people would be concerned by how pleased their self-elected cook sounds about Jack's omnivore credentials, but he figures the Fury is probably just glad to have someone who'll eat leftovers and failed culinary experiments without complaint. Besides, Tristan chews on raw fish tails when the opportunity presents, such as having a special ops unit's worth of them in a pile that were going to be thrown out anyway. Who is he to judge on matters of taste?

As father and son perch in the tree above Jack's post, Adam abruptly realizes that they can cover their shared territory more quickly if they split up. He quickly explains this reasoning and vanishes into the night, at least to human senses. Tristan can tell his son hasn't gone very far, still out there in the darkness watching Tristan watching Jack watching the perimeter for threats. He's starting to understand why Adam's concerned, now, so Tristan moves on very deliberately, making it clear by not making it _too_ clear that Tristan is no threat to Jack's virtue, or Adam's claim on it. 

Jack is strong and capable, so that's a mark in his favor as a prospective mate. Tristan will work more on his own small investigations later. He somehow doesn't feel surprised that his son is homosexually inclined, and isn't bothered by the understanding, either. A visible freak among visible freaks in the middle of nowhere, the flavor of Adam's attraction can't make life much harder for his son, although it makes detective work a little more complicated for Tristan. He knows he's no judge of male desirability, but he still feels it's his fatherly duty to ensure Adam's partner is worthy. At least he always has the dead and their lifetimes of romance to poll for the experience he lacks.

He does report back to his Boss, when they meet in that comfortable midday bedtime they've worked out, when she comes off of the forenoon watch and Tristan, a crepuscular beast who veers nocturnal, is so happy to have the love of his life join him in a nap. Sometimes it's a "nap," or both, as she prefers. A shared siesta in the worst heat of the day is perfect for pillow talk, too, when you need a little light to show what your paw-hands are saying. 

She confirms very quickly that she shares Tristan's suspicions, then sighs and warns him they're all in for the long haul, especially if Adam is still trying to be subtle about having a crush.

"Jack's not stupid; he just... I suppose he learns best by watching, and I haven't given him a good example, until now."

That's neither of their fault, but Tristan's still sorry for it. She never had another cat-man or even some kind of human to treat her how she ought to be treated, although she insists it was all due to time management, not a sense of duty to her presumed-dead ocelot-man. He never thought to tell her, but Tristan would have never asked her to go without anything that she wanted. Now even her student Jack, by extension, has been missing out on a good time, all because Tristan wasn't specific enough that his Joy owed him nothing she didn't want to give. Tristan rolls his body closer in to hers, purring as he settles in, as though they could make up for the past if they just squeezed tightly enough now.

~(=^‥^)

Tristan only finds out later that nobody expected him to spend much time with the Fury. Usually smelling of burned things already, the Fury is the Cobras' primary cook, but his active opposition to any other volunteers for kitchen duty doesn't appear to include Adam. Tristan knows he can't teach his son anything about using careful heat to prepare food with your human hands, so he's already grateful to the glowering, scarred-up cosmonaut for being such a good mentor, and is pleased to find that the welcome granted to Adam seems to apply to his long-lost father as well.

It's either that or he's just that good at staying out from underfoot, a cat watching quietly in the corner as the Fury cooks dinner with the occasional, oddly calm, spirit peeking in as well. Unlike a housecat waiting for scraps, Tristan can also hold things and stir things and scrub the dishes, and he shows the Fury how he's figured out that the smart way to get the meat out of these armored catfish is to slit them from the bottom up, avoiding their awful spines entirely. He also manages to explain that Russian is just as good as English if you're talking to him. No language is going to get a verbal reply from Tristan, but there hasn't really been any confusion about that part. 

Trading fish recipes in his native language loosens the Fury's tongue, and afterwards Tristan is treated to a constant low mutter, mostly about death and fire, in general and in specific. Tristan supposes it's a habit born of solitude and a halfway-soundproof helmet, the latter having been set aside in the equatorial heat. It isn't much different from the monologues of the angrier spirits, and like their pain, sometimes the best Tristan can contribute is his attentive presence and a purr. The Fury's comfort with quiet cat-man companionship extends, surprisingly, to sitting next to him on one of the camp's felled-log benches while dinner simmers and the Fury's thoughts turn audibly to aeronautics engineering, along with the usual fiery death.

Tristan wakes pleasantly from the irresistible call of a sunny afternoon nap to find himself mostly draped over the Fury's lap. He keeps up the purr that he started in his sleep as the tips of scarred fingers very gently rub between his shoulder blades, where a grandfather in the _banya_ would have a hairy back and Tristan has about a shawl's worth of furry ocelot pelt. The Fury is still murmuring about fire, but as it applies to the soup possibly boiling over, and Tristan thinks what might have woken him are the frequent references to a _khoroshiy kotenok._

Tristan doesn't mind the title or the scritches, having spent a lifetime being both a sentient being and also a very _nice kitty,_ and not getting friendly physical contact through most of it. He's also a polite kitty, so Tristan stretches himself to show he's awake, then rubs his cheek on the Fury's shoulder to head off any embarrassment before he peels himself off of his temporary pillow. That frees them both to stir the fish stew that's going to feed the entire Cobra Unit shortly; there are always a few crusted bits on the bottom of the pot, but it's bad form if there are enough of them to make up Jack's entire dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is one of Kobayashi Issa's Lover Cat haiku; "dirty, yes but the cat has a wife." Sweet prose translation collection [here](https://www.everything2.com/title/Kobayashi+Issa%2527s+Cat+Poems)
> 
> Originally, this story was going to end abruptly with Chapter 17, but Not_You gently yet forcefully explained that I needed to write about people being goddamn happy for once.


	19. some day, you feed on a tree frog

The Fear has very helpfully sourced a wooden comb from the village, traded for who knows how many cigarettes, and with a rag wrapped around the handle it's perfect for Tristan's clumsy paw-fingers to curl around. Adam hasn't said it out loud, but he's been growing out his fine, blond, _just like his mother's_ hair, and when he gets back from patrolling their territory he pointedly tolerates Tristan alighting behind him and combing out the pieces of leaf and stick that always get stuck in one's hair and/or fur from a good cat-man careen through the branches.

As much as Adam's pride makes him aloof, it's hard for either of them not to purr, and easy for a hair-combing to turn into a general head massage. The Pain and the Boss are sitting across from each other at one of the knocked-together tables nearby, occupying themselves with routine weapons maintenance the same way adults in other families might knit or clean a pipe in companionable silence. Silence other than the contribution of the Pain's hornets, whose gentle buzz is familiar now. They've been as friendly as the Pain had promised Tristan they would be, and their wings make a nice counterpoint to the purring duet.

Then Jack ambles into the clearing, coming off of afternoon watch. He's been relieved by the End, who will either bring a sniper's focus to the combined dog watch, or fall asleep and test the Boss' quiet theory that they can start to relax their surveillance. As far as Tristan has seen, when Jack is at loose ends, his plans are straightforward. Today, Tristan would bet on the agenda being a search for leftovers and then sitting down with his feet up; Jack is looking over his teammates like he's doing a head count, nothing more.

"I don't have _BUGS,_ Dad," Adam abruptly decides, and shakes his head to dishevel his hair and remove Tristan's paws before he springs up and bounds off alone into the forest. 

Jack watches Adam go, but seems to be at his usual level of untroubled confusion, the one where he's taking mental notes in case things add up later, but still continuing with his day-to-day in the meantime. Tristan gets to savor his own personal moment without discussion, just meeting his Joy's eyes as they both smile. Blurted out on automatic, he's fully Adam's "Dad" now. 

"I have bugs, Dad," the Pain notes conversationally. Cleaning his shotgun at the table, he's probably talking more to Tristan's Boss than anyone, but ocelot ears are big.

"You don't have _hair,_ dear," she reminds the Pain, still smiling even if now she doesn't take her eyes off of her trench knife on the whetstone. Jack, meanwhile, has found the pan with lunch's cold biscuits. With his mouth full, he's moving on to check if there's still coffee left, but Tristan can see Jack's occasional glance to the forest, about to the spot where Adam disappeared.

~(=^‥^)

Tristan has very little romantic expertise of his own. He had his vital statistics reviewed before he was chosen from a catalog, like a mail-order rifle, then he was literally picked up off the floor by the most beautiful woman in the world and carried to bed in her strong arms. If you count the years of second-hand stories from his spirit confidantes, however, he thinks he has enough of a body of knowledge to make a careful attempt at helping Adam's plight, with the best of fatherly intentions to support it.

The dead have much less reason to lie and are bored enough to be candid about some very personal matters. Their own lives' experiences under his belt, he doesn't see any reason that homosexuality would be _less_ common in modern days, so he's not shocked, just a little curious about the direction his son's crush has taken. If he cocks his head and thinks hard about it, Tristan can see some of the things he loves about his Boss expressed in Jack, although imagining Jack as a grumbly but clean-shaven woman is a complete nonstarter. Of course, Adam is his own man; even if he did want a woman, he wouldn't be looking for a mate who's a 1:1 likeness of his terrifying and beautiful mother anyway. That's good, because Tristan is certain there's nobody else like his Joy, and he wouldn't want Adam to be deprived of anything.

Jack, that serious young man who arrived late and armed to Tristan's violent family reunion, is also called Snake. The name doesn't really fit with the rest of the Cobras' established brand, but Jack doesn't seem to feel left out. Jack doesn't have any freakish physical features, since being muscular and scruffy is expected with his career and his new habitat, respectively. He's friendly enough, but not very talkative. The last is a fact which Tristan, whose voicebox can make cat noises, notes as a descriptor and not any kind of value judgment. Still, "Snake" is clearly not a reference to the silver-tongued seducer in the Garden of Eden. 

With the already established difficulty in asking questions, combined with Jack's natural reticence, Tristan decides to save them both the trouble and talk to Jack's dead instead. For such a young man, he has so many spirits following him already. Some of them are here because Jack killed them and they're still bothered by it, some are here because they died (or Jack killed them) but they thought he was amazing in the same way most of Tristan's Joy's gathered dead think she's amazing. Both these groups of spirits agree, some grudgingly, that Jack is an accomplished warrior, honorable in his conduct and kind to noncombatants, tenacious and, physically, extremely sturdy. Some of Jack's dead, however, tell Tristan that they're still tied to this plane entirely because Jack is train-wreck _hilarious._

Even if Tristan is concerned by that editorial skew, he has to admit that the laughing spirits have the stories that are the most helpful in assessing Jack's personal life and dating potential. There's debate among the dead, but the two main theories are either that Jack is named Snake because of a random draw for call signs, or that it's a mark of esteem and Jack won it, possibly with the particular completion record he set on some big-deal tactical obstacle course. Something that muddies the waters is that Jack also likes to catch and eat snakes. That's another thing Tristan can't judge too harshly from a personal standpoint, and the code name was assigned long before the spirits got to watch Jack hole up in a gully and dig past all his pristine ration packs to get to the lightly-killed mamba he'd been looking forward to.

> "Yeah, so he just charges in, fights six of our guys at once, and let me tell you, it made me feel a helluva lot better about lasting maybe a minute with him, one-on-one. We're using these stupid keycards, so after he's fucking destroyed everyone I bunked with for the past year, he's got to get his radio idiots to stop yammering about kids' movies or some shit and help him figure out which thing goes in which slot _this_ week, and you can about see it in his eyes the whole time: _the guy wants to be out in the mud again,_ just freezing his ass off and eating raw frogs like he's stealing Grandma's cookies from the jar. There's something about him, I mean, it's funny, but at the same time, I guess it's compelling, you know? I mean, after he snapped my neck I was feeling more floaty, like I was starting to come disconnected and not really caring because I was leaving everything behind for another place... but then I start following Snake around and I feel like I'm a pocket that he's started sewing back onto a shirt or something stupid like that, like I'm part of the world but only because he's beating ass or getting his own ass beat and it feels like, through him, I'm a greater part of that cycle of ass-beating, more than when I was alive, you know?"

Tristan does know, actually, and since there aren't a lot of other living people who do, the spirits around Jack are eager to talk to his new biographer. After enough stories about Jack's skills at on-site procurement, Tristan muses to the spirits that, should Jack wish to fit thematically with the rest of the Cobra Unit, maybe he should call himself "the Hunger." Considering Tristan independently named himself "Sorrow," the suggestion was made in earnest, but it's apparently also the height of dead soldier/mercenary/hired goon hilarity. The owners of the invisible hands slapping Tristan's back tell him they'll help keep him up to date on Adam's progress, although it isn't promising how they seem excited about watching _another_ prospective mate fling himself at Jack's obliviousness.

Tristan also wonders if it should be worrying that Jack doesn't seem to mind an ocelot-man sitting a few yards away from him in the grey dusk, tail moving slowly as he silently stares at nothing over Jack's shoulder. Jack knows Tristan is there, and even glances up when Adam alights and makes it two ocelot-men. The new arrival is frowning and his tail is slightly bristled, like he's ready to defend his claim on Jack, which is absolutely unnecessary and also absolutely adorable. Tristan says hello with a purr that's eventually matched as he rubs faces to greet his son; that done, he discreetly leaves to let Adam get back to stalking his uncomprehending prey.

~(=^‥^)

Adam has been diligently providing small game and iguanas to Jack since their ship arrived, and unlike the wasteful hunts of the usual jungle tourists, not one delicious bite of lizard-flesh gifted to Jack has gone uneaten. Tristan does enjoy a good iguana, and ever since his Joy came back in his life, he's had the same feeling deep-down like he should bring her the best of his fresh kill, to make up for all the years she had nobody. (He also feels like he should lick her all over, for mostly the same reason but also some selfish ones.)

No longer a hormonal teenager but a seasoned adult, Tristan can stop and remind himself that although _his_ genome is partially that of an obligate carnivore, his lady fair is entirely human. Of course, his Joy can survive in the wilderness for as long as necessary, lighting no fires, leaving no trace and certainly no witnesses behind. In peacetime she prefers an assortment of fresh fruit--the granadillas and mangoes are looking especially good at the very top of the trees--with a single perfect iguana, parboiled, skinned and roasted, on the side. (The second part of his earlier plan is still solid, though, and has met with his Boss' ringing endorsement.) 

She's also told him, after the moment has passed as many times as she desires, how pleasantly surprised she is that the Fury has been so agreeable to helping Tristan cook her these breakfasts-in-bed, some of them with bartered eggs next to the iguana fillets. The Fury is a valuable member of the team, but not usually _agreeable_ to much of anything. Tristan has been spending a lot of time with the Fury, and it takes paw-gestures as well as big thick crayon on paper to explain to his Boss that, although the downed cosmonaut is naturally very sad and angry about his _dedd Space frends,_ the ghosts that the Fury hears screaming for help and cursing his name are not the same kind of dead that Tristan can see and hear and talk to.

"I see," she says, and that's all she has to say out loud. They keep quiet company for a while after that, other than Tristan's purring, and his thoughts drift to how different it is to love a Boss than a Snake. Tristan finds it so strangely easy not to be territorial, not to be jealous over the time that she spends with all her other people here. Adam of course is their beloved son and deserves as much time to catch up with his mother as he can have. As Adam's father, one step closer to their spitting wildcat heritage and years deep in the savagery of their ancestral habitat, Tristan has that echo of a feeling that he should be more bothered when his Boss goes off alone with the Fear and the Fear's pointy face and limber body, even if they're doing nothing more salacious than fixing the tarps that are aerial camouflage over the boat.

He just doesn't have to worry about her. He does worry about her, but he knows he doesn't have to. She's everybody's Boss and her own Boss, and she does what she wishes and what she must. Tristan feels that brief, seductive call of an ocelot's wild indignation overlaying everyday trespasses, such as when someone else uses _the bowl he likes,_ but being jealous of how his Boss distributes herself would be like having a vendetta against the sunshine or the rain.

For his own part, Jack is a very nice young man, and if things ever do progress, Tristan thinks that Adam will have done very well for himself. Making the obvious comparisons and allowing a father his bias, Jack is not the one in this tentative relationship who is anything like an imperious blonde Valkyrie, but since his Joy settled for his skinny half-cat personage, Tristan would be a hypocrite to argue against Adam picking his own mortal to carry off.


	20. love speaks me entire, a word of fur

Serious young Jack also doesn't seem surprised to wake up to ocelot eyes gleaming green in the near-darkness. After a moment of readying himself for attack, followed by a longer moment of mutual staring, he ends up noting the family resemblance and thanking Tristan for being sort of dressed and also not interfering with his rack. 

"Huh, Adam's dad. It's too damn early... ...did _you_ piss on any of my things? Hrm; your son used to say 'hi' by pi--mmm, by urinating. All over my laundry. Hasn't done it since then; you show him where the family pee trees are out here? Boss says it's something about growing up in a lab. Guess you'd know, huh?"

There's no condescension about their predilection to territorial marking, just a naturalist's assumption. As a rule, Jack seems to spend too much time observing and trying to draw conclusions about things to have time to move on to moral judgment. Maybe that's why Jack is so serious, working hard to make sense of it all. Tristan sympathizes; he had the spirits, from an early age, reassuring him that no, nothing in this world did make sense; it wasn't just _him._

Tristan also spent years trying not to mind not being human, doing his best to be just a silly little cat who likes to help out his science pals and doesn't exactly have feelings, not the same way real people do. Thinking about how Adam used to be treated the same way, though, surprises Tristan with how quickly the very idea grips his heart and squeezes. It's an injustice and it make his blood boil and his own muscles tense up, the ocelot inside gearing for a fight with people who aren't even on the same continent.

Jack surprises Tristan by noticing that silent tension, but, luckily for their combined dignity, he seems mostly concerned in the way people in the village get concerned when their chickens all stop clucking at once. He knows his visitor has better night vision than he does, and Jack is always ready to listen to an intel briefing from a friendly.

Tristan has learned all about Jack's taste for frogs from the spirits of the dead who loiter around him and spectate, a platoon of old soldiers watching a new recruit just keep on hazing himself. They might think eating live crawling things is funny, but Tristan was earnestly pleased to discover someone who shares an interest with him, despite being a baseline, unmodified human. Nobody living in the Cobras' camp is stuck up enough to say no to fresh wild-caught protein, but that's still not the same thing as the honest appreciation for bushmeat that Jack has.

He's no master of romance, but Tristan has an innate sense of wildcat etiquette, and realizes that just handing Jack a few of the area's enormous horned frogs would _not_ be appreciated by Adam. His son has made his claim on his own human very clear, even if he doesn't deign to speak about it. At this delicate stage Tristan knows it would be too easy for Adam to arrive at the first meeting of the Frog Fanciers' Club and mistake them for courting gifts, in the fog of young love and ocelot instincts. Luckily, Jack has already pulled his fatigues on and is more than ready to go on some kind of pre-dawn surprise adventure, even though Tristan's sign for "frog" ends up being a mystery to Jack, and simple miming seems to have confused the matter more. Jack can definitely parse "eat," though, and that's enough to get him following his new comrade into the wild.

"Huh," Jack says later, having also agreed with Tristan on splitting a fresh horned frog before they bring a few more home for those Philistines among them to cook. "These frogs _are_ good. Nice fat ones. Hmm...you know, Adam just _brings_ me the lizards. Big green jobs; iguanas."

Tristan doesn't hear reproach in that, just a point of order. Since they've already had an early morning meeting of the minds on frog hunting techniques, frog cooking techniques, frog tartare being delicious and which specific paw-sign means "frog" after all, Tristan decides he might as well try to explain, in his limited way, the significant difference between his and Adam's relationships with Jack.

 _I belong to the Boss,_ he signs carefully and so very slowly, and there might be a bit of a light in Jack's eyes that's more than recognizing their mutual Boss' name-sign. _I belong to the Boss. I bring iguanas to the Boss. I bring frogs to the Boss. I love her. I love the Boss, and I bring her iguanas and frogs._

It isn't poetry, but it might as well be for Jack, who furrows his brow and hums to himself a little.

"Yeah, you're the Boss' man, so you bring her game meat, and you do what she says. Well, so do all of us, but, hmm. I'm thinking... hmm, she had you come show me... because she wants me to know how to find frogs, so I can hunt them for myself, and not have to depend on anyone."

He knows Jack saw all the _love_ in there, and Tristan's frustration at a failed, if spur-of-the-moment, attempt at communicating abstract concepts, is salved by Jack spitting out a bone and giving him a muddy, one-armed hug.

"It's good, isn't it, having her back. I don't know what I woulda done."

Tristan has a disconcerting moment of simultaneously wondering what his Joy sees in him, and also wondering if there's any of it here in Jack that's been hitting Adam's inherited buttons. He comes out at a loss, at first, other than noting they're both quiet and hairy. It finally hits him, watching Jack crouching back down by the stream, poking into decaying leaves with a stick. Jack is the kind of man, Tristan realizes, who would also be more or less OK with living the silent life of an animal in the wild, all alone, for almost twenty years. 

He hasn't had his son back for long, but Tristan already knows that Adam will only tolerate things for a purpose, and _purpose_ is something Adam has a lot of, held deep within him, as regular as a heartbeat. A born commander needs a command to be complete, but it works the other way around maybe even more, and that's yet another reason Tristan loves his Boss. Adam has his mother's sovereignty, but it's been tainted enough by Tristan's skulking ocelot reclusiveness that maybe Adam does only want one person to be _his,_ at least for now. One person to both lead and follow, and that's still good for both of them; Jack could do with a little help and some hands-on direction.

~(=^‥^)

Of course, the Boss is the one who decides that there has been more than enough surveillance and data-gathering, and moves the matchmaking operation to its next stage. His Boss has many things Tristan does not, but right now there are two that are most important: her command of spoken language, and an understanding of her own innate imperium.

After all of the advice of the dead, after Tristan's careful nudging, some aborted attempts at banter by the Pain and the Fear, and of course Adam's pigtail-pulling and midnight iguana catering, the way Jack figures out that Adam is in love with him is because the Boss sits Jack down and explicitly tells him that her son loves him and also wants to fuck him, although a mother can be excused for not knowing the exact details of the last proposition. It took multiple tries, she tells Tristan later, but Jack seemed confused and then skeptical and then confused again but sort of speculative, with no stop at "outraged," so there is progress as well as hope.

This is all very nostalgic, reminding Tristan of how emphatic his Boss was about getting Tristan into bed, and how proactive she was in a courting process that was unfamiliar to both of them. He tells her this and she immediately agrees, eyes sparkling with her big, callused hand gentle around the back of Tristan's neck, where his hair is mostly fur. She also agrees with Tristan's corollary to his observation: deep in teenage love and primal ocelot-instincts, Adam would not appreciate sharing in this tender reminiscence, or really having to make any acknowledgment at all of the heroic effort his parents are putting into getting him laid.

Jack's feelings are much less easily bruised, so Tristan is happy to be his Boss' lovely assistant for a two-on-one language class, or _a cappella_ jazz recital, teaching Jack the growls and trills and yowls of an ocelot love serenade. There's nobody else to do it, with the local wildcats giving the Cobra Unit's clearly-marked territory a wide berth, and the family heirloom reel-to-reel of mating calls presumed lost in the wreckage of a bombed-out laboratory, somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. 

They wait on Jack's tutoring until Adam is far away from camp, both for his sake and theirs, and Tristan is careful not to embarrass himself as he hears his Joy sing loud in mixed company. It really is a lot easier the more secure you are in your partner, and also probably the farther you get from adolescence. Still, even if he keeps his forgiving poncho on and doesn't start rubbing even his neck on her, his Joy's presence combined with her hideous and energetic yowling leads to goo-goo eyes on Tristan's part, enough public affection for even Jack to notice and excuse himself over.

~(=^‥^)

His Boss has had a lifetime of training herself to stay ready always for battle, but his own vigilance came hardwired in, and his ears are much, much larger than hers. After he identifies the distant yowls, Tristan pokes her awake with a furry paw-hand. (In his Boss' defense, it requires very little poking before she's alert and ready to be briefed.)

"Adam and Jack," he signs to her in the moonlight, grinning. With the caterwauling that's still making it past the dampening effect of the forest and the noise of the waterfall, Adam's part in this mess barely needs noting. The name-sign they've arrived on for Jack is just "snake" made with as much of a J-hand as your personal fingers will let you articulate; it's precariously close to the sign for "lizard," but again, the context makes it clear: with iguanas, and ordinary snakes, Adam is a silent hunter. 

"Oh, thank God," his Joy says, wrapping his furred and spindly body up in her sturdy arms. "I was ready to start making territorial displays about _you_ if neither of them did anything. Let him see how annoying he was getting and maybe he'd escalate things, out of stubbornness if nothing else."

Tristan can't really defend his son from such a fair criticism, so he replies the best way he can: with quiet but deliberately human-accented mating calls. They both learned that old nature recording front to back, so many years ago, but his Boss' trained linguistic skills took a while to catch up to Tristan's purpose-built voicebox. That recording might even be the closest thing they have to "our song," so Tristan's flawless impression of the faded, wobbly part in the middle of a yowl, where the physical tape had gotten stretched near to breaking, is met with due recognition in the form of a whack with a pillow.

"Adam's going to eat him alive," she says like a promise as she rolls herself on top of Tristan, who is absolutely not complaining about anything as she pins his arms to the bed. His Joy overwhelms him and he knows that somewhere out there, Adam has caught his prey. The morning can come when it wants to; Tristan is happy to be here, and he knows that Jack is a survivor, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from ["The Cat's Song"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44880/the-cats-song) by Marge Piercy. I like this line for both of them, but the poem as a whole is much more kemonomimi Ocelot.
> 
> Thanks for reading through all the way.


	21. appendix: Tristan's Poetry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not_You, whom I have been explicit in blaming for all of this, noted that Tristan had to be getting up to _something_ in the jungle besides ghost-talking and being a good neighbor. The comment thread in its entirety is [here,](https://archiveofourown.org/comments/191989547) but I'll excerpt the tragic LOLcat bark-scratched poetry for ease of reference:

U clawed me w/yr Prrfect Hands  
\+ dRank my Gratful Blud  
I hadd no mother's milk, mai sun  
but Offered wat I cud

Yr Eyes were closed wen first we met  
they opend leaden Grey  
I did not Dare enuf, mai sun  
to Beg Them let u stay

I Cursd u w/my Ears + tail  
Did SHE give u her fire  
Whatever u have got from us  
U make your own--entire

Do Ancient Voices speak to u,  
as they admonished me?  
Or R u fearless, like She was  
so ♡ makes boddy free

those Men who keep u, R they kind  
to let u clime up hi  
or is ur World a concrete room--  
Sun, have u seen the sky??

I'dd take from u captivity  
if paws cud hold the keys  
\+ trade u this I did not earn  
the earth, the wind, the trees

My skin still feels eech tiny claw  
eech Tooth inside yr hedd  
I hope that wen we meet, mai sun  
It's me--just ME--whos dedd


End file.
